![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Hispanic and Portuguese WorldTHE MODERN STATES OF THE AMERICASThe development of the Library's Hispanic and Portuguese collections parallel the emergence of new republics in the Americas, as independence movements swept the Hemisphere throughout the nineteenth century. Materials for the study of the governments--presidencies, congresses, assemblies, courts of justice--of the region, such as records of congressional debates from their origin in the nineteenth century and official publications from republics and extensive research materials on related subjects, make the Library's holdings unequalled for completeness. The relationships of individuals and countries are reflected in the Library's manuscript, book, map, print, law, official publication, recording, and music collections.
The LUÍS DOBLES SEGREDA COLLECTION, on microfilm, is a comprehensive record of publication from and about Costa Rica. The distinguished Costa Rican scholar and diplomat Dobles Segreda began his collection in 1910 in an effort to bring together as many writings as possible on his country, wherever published. The collection, purchased by the Library of Congress in 1943, contained more than 5,600 books and pamphlets issued between 1831 and the 1930s. The papers of Ephraim George Squier, in the Manuscript and Geography and Map Divisions, are essential for the study of Central America in the mid-nineteenth century. Squier (1821-1888), author of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), Nicaragua (1852), Notes on Central America (1855), Honduras (1870), and Peru (1877) and a U.S. diplomat and entrepreneur, had maintained an impressive collection of papers on his anthropological research and diplomatic and business activities in Central America and Peru, including correspondence, business records, manuscripts for publications, and related materials from 1841 to 1888. A group of thirty-eight maps of Central America and Peru drawn or annotated by Squier provides detailed information on Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. These materials, compiled primarily for Squier's nineteenth- century canal and railway initiatives in Central America, provide a glimpse into the intense U.S.-British rivalry in Central America when Squier was diplomatic representative. The Manuscript Division also has the papers of Central American filibusters William Walker and David Deaderick and the Guatemalan documents collection which contains some 35,000 items pertaining to government agencies, political parties, and labor unions (1944-1954) during the Arévalo and Arbenz presidencies. The papers of Chandler P. Anderson, in the Manuscript Division, relate to the international diplomatic and arbitration efforts of a lawyer in Central America, Cuba, and Panama, including records on the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty, the Chamizal (Mexico) case, the Nicaragua-Honduras boundary dispute (1920-1921), Nicaraguan politics, and Panama-Costa Rica boundary disputes (1914-1932).
International interest in the construction of an interoceanic canal across the Central American isthmus is extremely well documented in the Library of Congress. The JOSEPH AND ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL COLLECTION, in the Prints and Photographs Division, contains copies of Joseph Pennell's graphic prints on the construction of the Panama Canal. In 1978 the Library acquired the PANAMA CANAL ZONE LIBRARY-MUSEUM COLLECTION which documented the U.S. role in the Panama Canal Zone in the twentieth century. This multiformatted collection has been disbursed throughout the Library, with rich holdings in the Geography and Map and Serial and Government Publications Divisions, as well as the general books collection. The papers of George W. Goethals and William Gorgas on Panama Canal construction are in the Manuscript Division, as are those of Philippe Jean Buneau-Varilla which address French and United States efforts to build a canal in Panama by one of its participants, the Nicaraguan Canal Construction Company (1886-1891) and of Lewis Haupt (Nicaraguan Canal Project 1861-1923) and of the numerous surveys by U.S. representatives, including those of naval officer Charles Whiteside Rae of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1870-1871), naval officer Thomas Oliver Selfridge, Jr.'s correspondence and maps relating to his survey of the Isthmus of Darien for a proposed interoceanic canal (1869-1874), and naval officer Robert Wilson Shufeldt's correspondence and maps pertaining to his 1870 to 1871 survey expedition in Tehuantepec in search of a trans-Isthmus canal route. The Library's materials on modern Mexico are particularly extensive. The Manuscript Division has a collection of manuscripts, military diaries, correspondence, family documents of Mexican Emperor Agustín de Iturbide (1799-1876), and correspondence of Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna. The Microform Reading Room has, on seventy-two reels of microfilm from the Banco de México, the papers of Matías Romero, Mexico's diplomat in the United States from 1864 to 1867. The ARCHIV KAISER MAXIMILIANS VON MEXIKO COLLECTION, in the Manuscript Division, contains photocopies of Austrian archival documents pertaining to the French occupation of Mexico, 1861-1865, and the Microform Reading Room has the ARCHIVO MAXIMILIANO DE HAPSBURGO (a seventy-four-reel microfilm collection from Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) which contains copies of manuscripts and printed materials from the nineteenth century on the reign of Maximilian in Mexico including letters, telegrams, circulars, decrees, broadsides, poems, newspaper and magazine articles, and speeches, covering political and military affairs, international relations and diplomacy, and legal, commercial, and financial matters.
The impact of the early twentieth-century revolution in Mexico is documented by substantial materials in the Library of Congress. The Manuscript Division has army officer John L. Hines's annotated photoprocessed intelligence maps showing the operations of General John J. Pershing's 1916 Punitive Expedition in Mexico as well as Pershing's papers. The Microform Reading Room has the papers of Adalberto Tejeda (governor of the state of Vera Cruz, 1920-1924); the ARCHIVO DE DON FRANCISCO I. MADERO (on twenty-two reels of microfilm from the collections of Mexico's INAH), containing handwritten, typed, and printed materials from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dealing with that Mexican president's public life and in which are found letters, telegrams, circulars, bills, newspaper and magazine clippings, business orders and accounts, the handwritten original of Madero's classic work, La sucesión presidencial, and coverage of Madero's presidential campaign in Mexico in 1910 and other political matters; and the ARCHIVO DE LA REVOLUCIóN MEXICANA (on eighty-five reels of microfilm from Mexico's INAH), which is a collection of bound typewritten transcripts of diverse printed and manuscript originals from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries dealing with the issues, institutions, and personalities of the Mexican Revolution.
The Library's collection of materials on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cuba is quite rich. Among these materials are found, in the Manuscript Division, the Juan and Nicolás Arnao papers (1868-1898), of these two Cuban revolutionaries among whose papers are found revolutionary publications and letters from José Martí, Máximo Gómez, and Antonio Maceo; the Domingo del Monte collection of manuscripts pertaining to Cuban history (1500-1869) with substantial holdings on colonial administration, military affairs, and nineteenth-century abolitionist and revolutionary activities; and the papers of José Ignacio Rodríguez (1860-1907), a Cuban in the United States, who served in the Bureau of American Republics and as the first librarian of the Columbus Memorial Library, and later of the Organization of American States. His collection also includes the papers of the Cuban reformer José Manuel Mestre and of Cuban American political societies. The Recorded Sound Reference Center of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division has an extensive collection of commercial and noncommercial recordings, including 230 radio monitorings of Fidel Castro's speeches.
The first independent Latin American nation, Haiti, is represented by extensive holdings, among which is found a collection of original addresses and proclamations for the period 1798-1800 of Haitian liberator Toussaint L'Ouverture, in the Manuscript Division, and a selection on microfilm of portions of the Mangones collection of books and manuscripts on independence and the early national period, in the Microform Reading Room. The papers of various U.S. citizens involved in inter- American affairs, in the Manuscript Division, include those of Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, James K. Polk, U. S. Grant, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren G. Harding; of U.S. Secretaries of State, such as Henry Clay, William Marcy, James G. Blaine, Richard Olney, John Hay, Philander C. Knox, Charles Evans Hughes, Cordell Hull, and Henry Kissinger; and of special diplomats Joel Poinsett, Jeremy Robinson, Nicholas B. Trist, John Barrett, and Josephus Daniels. Involvement in the affairs of various Latin American nations are reflected in the papers in the Manuscript Division of P. G. T. Beauregard, Winfield Scott, David Connor (U.S.-Mexican War 1846-1848), George Dewey and Pascual Cervera (Spanish American War), Leonard Wood (U.S. Army of occupation in Cuba), and in the papers of private citizens and organizations including those of Mary Mann (correspondent on educational initiatives with Sarmiento, Mitre, and other nineteenth-century Argentine leaders), Clara Barton (Spanish American War), and the Women's Auxiliary Conferences of Pan American Congresses (minutes and correspondence, 1915-1927). The Geography and Map Division possesses an original manuscript map of the U.S. siege of Vera Cruz during the U.S.-Mexican War, prepared by P. G. T. Beauregard, and photocopies of Robert E. Lee's map collection from that same war. Discussions of inter-American commercial interests are found in the papers of Riggs and Company (Central and South America, 1816-1854) and the National Citizens Committee on Relations with Latin America (financial and banking matters, 1905-1921), in the Manuscript Division, and the 214-reel microfilm collection, the GIBBS ARCHIVE: THE PAPERS OF ANTONY GIBBS & SONS, 1744-1953, in the Microform Reading Room, which consists of the family papers, and the business archives of Antony Gibbs and Sons, 1808-1969, a British business firm with particularly strong interests in Spain, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Brazil.
The Manuscript Division's collection of the papers of U.S. Latin American specialists include those of James A. Robertson, Samuel Guy Inman, and Howard F. Cline, a former chief of the Library's Hispanic Division.
The first printed maps of independent Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile are located in the Geography and Map Division. In that collection the researcher can find items ranging from general maps for every country and period to detailed plans from the 1920s of Cuban sugar warehouses among its fire insurance maps. There are literally tens of thousands of maps for Latin America in the collection, including those in the Nicaraguan Canal Construction Company papers (with field survey books and soundings, 1887-1913), to the most recent cartographic data for each country. More than 960 separate map series, on topics such as topography, hydrography, geology, city planning, and soil types for various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean are available. Large quantities of nautical and hydrographic charts produced by Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean governmental agencies are supplemented by comprehensive holdings of U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, British Admiralty, French Hydrographic Office, Spanish and Portuguese Marine, and U.S. Hydrographic Office charts.
Additional items of interest in the study of nineteenth- and twentieth- century activities in Latin America and the Caribbean are located in the Manuscript Division. Among these items are notebooks compiled by John Bull during the U.S.-Mexican boundary commission survey of 1850; John Wills Greenslade's papers and aerial oblique photographic prints and manuscript maps of areas selected in 1940 for proposed naval air bases in Antigua, the Bahamas, Bermuda, British Guiana, Jamaica, Martinique, St. Lucia, and Trinidad; and Francis LeJau Parker's manuscript maps depicting the Tacna Arica boundary dispute between Chile and Peru.
The FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION COLLECTION, in the Prints and Photographs Division, is probably the most famous pictorial record of American life in the 1930s. Roy E. Stryker, formerly an economics instructor at Columbia University, began this documentary project in 1935 for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Some of the photographers in the small staff were Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott. This collection is invaluable for its graphic representations of the impact of the Depression on portions of the Luso-Hispanic American community in the 1930s. The staff initially photographed the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the Midwest and West. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers documented rural conditions throughout the nation, life in urban communities, and the domestic impact of the war effort. Approximately 164,000 original FSA negatives, 2,600 Kodachrome transparencies, 75,000 photoprints, and some photographers' notebooks were transferred to the Library of Congress in 1944. In the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room are found documentaries of living conditions and news events on Latin America, from 1890s scenes of Mexico, Porfirio Díaz, and the Spanish American War to film footage of Argentine President Juan Perón. There also exists a unique collection of rare footage of Theodore Roosevelt in Latin America, including his activities in the Spanish American War and later trips to Panama, the Amazon, and Colombia. The PEABODY MUSEUM COLLECTION, a collection of sound recordings from the 1890s to the 1910s, in the Archive of Folk Song, is the result of the first documented use of mechanical recording equipment for ethnological research, by Jesse Walter Fewkes, an anthropologist affiliated with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University. Fewkes successfully recorded the speech and song of the Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine in March 1890 using a wax cylinder phonograph. He took the device on subsequent expeditions among the Zuñi and Hopi Indians of Arizona in 1890 and 1891. In 1970 the Peabody Museum presented to the Library a collection of early ethnological recordings which included over fifty of these historic Fewkes cylinders including a Mexican pastores collection dating from the turn of the century. The Library of Congress has acquired through purchase or gift extensive holdings of major Latin American newspapers (now on microfilm) including El Mercurio (Valparaiso and Santiago, Chile), 1827 to date; Jornal do Comercio (Rio de Janeiro), 1827 to date; El Siglo Diez y Nueve (Mexico City), October 1841-June 1896; O Estado de São Paulo (Brazil), 1875 to date; Excelsior (Mexico City), 1918 to date; El Comercio (Lima), 1839 to date; La Gaceta Mercantil (Buenos Aires), 1823-1852; La Nación (Buenos Aires), 1891 to date; El Día (Montevideo), 1890 to date; La Estrella de Panamá (Panama City), 1858 to date; Diario de la Marina (La Habana), 1832-1959; and El Tiempo (Bogotá), 1911 to date. For the study of Luso-Hispanic American groups, the Library has consistently included among its collecting activities the acquisition of newspapers from throughout the community including copies of La Prensa (New York, 1940-1968); Gráfico (New York, 1916-); La Opinión (Los Angeles, 1926-); The Brasilians (New York, 1973-); and Luso- Americano (Newark, 1975-).
A collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexican periodicals and newspapers, the HEMEROTECA HISTORICA MEXICANA COLLECTION from Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, is located in the Microform Reading Room. Such titles as El Ateneo, El Ferro-Carril, La Aguila Mexicana, Diario del Gobierno de la República Mexicana, Mefistofeles, La Democracia: Periódico del Gobierno de Oaxaca, Revista Telegráfica de México, La Aurora Literaria, Correo Semanario de México, La Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios, and El Telégrafo Americano are found there. The legal materials of Latin American and Caribbean nations- -the laws of nations, legislation, and official gazettes--are the strongest collection of any institution in the world. As one follows the progression of legal histories of the Americas, the complete sets of the congressional debates of national congresses, in the general books collection and on microfilm in the Microform Reading Room, are primary sources for the study of government in creation. A nearly one thousand-microfiche record of the Historia de los debates legislativos en México, from 1821 to 1991, is found in the Microform Reading Room. Also available on microform are the official publications of the Organization of American States, the United Nations, the League of Nations, and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and an estimated 98 percent of all U.S. doctoral dissertations that appear in Dissertation Abstracts. Contemporary political issues in Latin America have not escaped the Library of Congress's collecting interests. The Microform Reading Room has the Colección de documentos para la historia de la oposición política al estado autoritario en Chile 1973-l981 (in four microfiches) which contains documents produced by central committees, political commissions, congresses, and other organizations of political parties in opposition to Pinochet in Chile including those of the Socialists, Christian Democrats, Radicals, and the Communists; MAPU, Movimiento Acción Popular Unitaría, Chile which is a nineteen-microfiche collection by Información Documental de America Latina on that Chilean party's activities from 1969 to the early 1970s; and Partido Comunista de Chile, which is a ninety-four-microfiche collection on the activities of the Communist Party of Chile from 1950 through 1973 and includes the official papers and complete holdings of Principios (the official journal of the party's central committee).
The Library's office in Rio de Janeiro acquired in 1987 Pesquisa nunca mais, one of a limited edition of twenty-five copies detailing human rights abuses in Brazil during the 1960s and the 1970s. The Hispanic Division's Reading Room maintains a large file of declassified documents on the conflict in El Salvador in the 1980s and early 1990s from various U.S. agencies. A collection of over 11,000 items issued by sociopolitical, religious, labor, and minority grass roots organizations in Brazil between 1966 and 1992 was compiled by the Library of Congress's Overseas Operations Field Office in Rio de Janeiro. The series, Brazil's Popular Groups 1966-1992, on 141 reels of microfilm, is located in the Microform Reading Room. The microform collections Iglesia en América Latina and Puebla 79 (by Información Documental de America Latina) are comprehensive compilations of documents relating to the activities of the Catholic Church in Latin America from CELAM II (1968) to CELAM III (1979). The Library of Congress's holdings on Hispanic and Portuguese America, in which are found many irreplaceable treasures, have been assembled and supplemented for the advancement of the understanding of the Americas.
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