Primary Sources - History

Collection of sources that cover the countries of South America. Sources may not be in English.

Many hundreds of protest murals were created in Chile during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The photographer Andrés Romero Spethman worked alongside muralist brigades representing political parties such as the Partido Socialista and the Izquierda Cristiana. Created in and around Santiago between 1983 and 1990, the murals document the spirit, force, and iconography of political protest during an important period of Chilean history.

Digital images of Argentine presidential speeches from the 19th century

Primary resources broken down by region (Central America, Caribbean, and South America)

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.

This site provides links to open access digitized collections of primary sources that relate to Latin America and the Caribbean. The sources linked below range from collections of Mexican incunabula (1559-1600), to Latin American posters. The site is organized by format “Historical Texts by Country“, “Historical Texts General“, “Statistics“, “Visual Material by Country“, “Visual Material General“, and “Miscellaneous.”

The Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera is a steadily growing repository containing a previously unavailable subset of Princeton’s Latin American Ephemera Collection as well as newly acquired materials being digitized and added on an ongoing basis.

Panama and the Canal is a joint project from the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries and the Panama Canal Museum. Panama and the Canal builds from the former Panama Canal Museum's rich collection of Panama and Canal Zone materials and the extensive holdings on Panama and the whole of Latin America from the George A. Smathers Libraries' Latin American & Caribbean Collection, Government Documents Collection, and Map & Imagery Library.

Digitally preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and Afro-descended peoples in the Americas. This website provides information about the project and its history and tools that allow researchers to search the ESSSS database containing nearly 300,000 documents from three countries and several archives. While most of the documents contained here belong to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are also some Cuban documents from the sixteenth century and Brazilian documents from the seventeenth.

The posters included in this collection were created by a wide variety of social activists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, political parties, and other types of organizations across Latin America, in order to publicize their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and services. Even though posters produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela are the most abundant among the more than two thousand currently available in the site, almost every country in the region is represented. In terms of topics, some of the best represented are human rights, elections, gender issues, indigenous issues, labor, ecology and environmental issues, development, public health, and education. The Latin American Posters Collection is a component of the larger collection of Latin American ephemera that Princeton University Library has developed since the 1970s.

A digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-17th centuries. Arranged by country or area.

This database includes speeches, interviews, etc., by Fidel Castro from 1959 to 1996. All texts are in English.

Digital images of Mexican presidential speeches from the 19th century