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March 20, 2000
Press Contact: Guy Lamolinara (202) 707-9217

Library of Congress Debuts Digital Collection on Puerto Rico

The digital collection "Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nineteenth-and-Early-Twentieth Century Perspectives" debuts March 24 on the Library of Congress American Memory Web site at www.loc.gov.

The collection contains historically important writings by prominent Puerto Rican political activists and historians dating from 1831, approximately 70 years before the Spanish-American War, until 1929, 30 years after the conflict.

The Puerto Rico collection and the Library's 1998 online collection "The World of 1898: The Spanish American War" were undertaken to recognize the centennial of the Spanish-American War. Both collections were a collaborative project from the Library's Hispanic Division and the National Digital Library Program.

In "Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age," the only English-language works are texts from the postwar period. Among these are soldiers' reminiscences about the conflict and short histories designed to acquaint an American audience with Puerto Rico in the earliest years of its affiliation with the United States.

The collection comprises 16 monographs scanned from printed copies and 39 political pamphlets and two monographs and a journal scanned from microfilm. The pamphlets are part of the "Puerto Rican Memorial Collection 1846-1907," a collection of 447 pamphlets microfilmed in 1994 that covers agriculture and botany, economics, education, government, politics, history, literature, legal materials and public health. Reels 13 (addresses, essays, laws and political parties) and 14 (politics and government) are featured in "Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age."

All pamphlets are in Spanish. Four of the books are in English and the rest in Spanish. The materials in the collection were selected by Edmundo Flores, a curator in the Hispanic Division.

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PR 00-041
3/20/00
ISSN 0731-3527