Course Guide ~ HIST 126: Conquest of the Americas

The John Carter Brown Library's collection of books printed in Spanish America is among the finest in the world. In some areas, the collections are unmatched and include works found nowhere else. The Library has the largest collection in the world of books printed in Spanish America as a whole prior to ca. 1820, over 7,000 titles, encompassing the output of presses in Mexico, Peru, Central America, Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere. The remaining Spanish American presses represented in the JCB's collection include some of the rarest books printed in the Americas: those coming from the Jesuit missions of Paraguay in the early eighteenth century. Of the eight extant titles printed in the missions, the JCB owns six, more than any other library in the world. Of the 14 books in our Ecuador collection (as of 2012) all but two are unique copies, held nowhere else. Likewise of our collections of Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican, and Bolivian imprints, the majority can be found only at the JCB.

The Digital Florentine Codex gives access to a singular manuscript created by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists. Written in parallel columns of Nahuatl and Spanish texts and hand painted with nearly 2,500 images, the encyclopedic codex is widely regarded as the most reliable source of information about Mexica culture, the Aztec Empire, and the conquest of Mexico. Upon completion in 1577 at the Imperial Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco (today Mexico City), the manuscript was sent to Europe where it entered the Medici family’s library in Florence—thus, the Florentine Codex. This digital edition unlocks the manuscript’s content by making the texts and images searchable.

A digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-19th centuries, selected from Brown University's Latin American special collections. Use the Browse feature in the left hand menu to access resources listed by country.

The Archivo General de Indias (General Archives of the Indies, also known as the AGI) is a major Spanish archive in Seville, Spain, that contains a vast quantity of records relating to the Spanish colonial period. Today, the Archivo General consists of 43,000 legajos, or document bundles, and 80 million pages of documents. Besides records from almost every Spanish colonial possession in the Americas and Asia, famous contents include an almanac consulted and annotated by Christopher Columbus, four paintings by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, 17th century maps from almost every Spanish colony, and a bronze cannon from a Spanish galleon sunk near Cuba in 1622.

An international collaboration of more than 25 institutional partners throughout Mexico, Spain, Peru, and the United States that seeks to bring together digitally the first books printed in the Americas before 1601. The collection provides unique primary sources for a variety of academic fields studying Indigenous and Spanish American society during the sixteenth century.

This database allows searching of a representative sample of the object and photographic holdings of the NMAI along with basic information related to the item.
Also browsable by geographic area: South America, Andes, Central America, Amazonia, and Meso America

Francisco Hernández de Toledo (c. 1515 – 28 January 1587) was a naturalist and court physician to Philip II of Spain. In 1570, Hernández was ordered to embark on the first scientific mission in the New World, a study of the region's medicinal plants and animals. Hernández's work was published in 22 books in Latin, and was in the process of being translated to Spanish at the time of his death. These complete works have been digitized and are available in this archive maintained by la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.