Contributing Collections

Dr. Caroline Levander, Director of the Humanities Research Center, Carlson Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of English at Rice University, oversees material selection for the digital archive as well as the scholarly direction of the project. A broad goal of the material selection for the Our Americas Archive Partnership (OAAP) is to bring together digitized material that collectively illustrates the complex politics and histories occurring throughout the American hemisphere.

Rice University- Americas Archive

Material selection is primarily from the Rice University Woodson Research Center's Americas Collection, which specializes in multilingual materials dating from 1811 to 1920 that span Canada, the Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America. Primary sources include original letters, photographs, broadsides, pamphlets, and books. Textual materials include both printed and handwritten manuscripts. Many of the documents are original government publications such as constitutions, decrees, or presidential and congressional messages that serve as public statements on political and social events. The online collection contains digital page images as well as searchable electronic transcriptions of the original documents.

University of Maryland - Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA)

EADA is a collection of electronic texts of transcribed literary-historical narratives written in or about the Americas from 1492-1820. Many of the texts are not available to scholars elsewhere or are not available open access. The EADA originated in 2002 as part of the Early Ibero/Anglo Americanist Summit (hosted by the Society of Early Americanists). This event focused on new research opportunities, curricular models, and teaching materials related to hemispheric approaches to the study of the early Americas. An electronic anthology that served as the archival basis for conference discussion was the starting point for the subsequent collection and electronic dissemination of hard-to-find primary texts.

Instituto Mora - Fondo Antiguo Biblioteca Ernesto de la Torre Villar

Instituto Mora houses a collection of rare materials, including handwritten manuscripts, from the XVI to XIX centuries. It includes manuscripts, photographs and other visual materials that were originally part of the of the Fondo Jose Ignacio Conde with duplicates from the "Cervantes" and "Iberoamericana" libraries. The documents included in the online collection are displayed with both digital page images and searchable electronic transcriptions of the original documents.