Latin American & Caribbean Studies

To find primary documents from/about Latin America and the Caribbean at Duke University's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library,  search the Duke University Libraries catalog limiting your ADVANCED SEARCH by Location to Rubenstein Library. Search for SUBJECTS such as country name, personal name or research theme.

The Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) keeps a very useful online list of primary source digital projects located at member libraries.

Online Resources

• 500 años de México en documentos - A freely available archive of primary documents from Mexico from the 15th Century to the present.
• AccessUN - Provides access to current and retrospective United Nations documents and some publications.Slavery and Anti-Slavery
• America's Historical Newspapers - Allows users to search U.S. historical newspapers published between 1690 and 1922, with substantial coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean.
• ArchiveGrid - Contains historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world.
• Archives Unbound - Contains the collection,  Feminism in Cuba: Nineteenth through Twentieth Century Archival Documents and Foreign relations between Latin America and the Caribbean States, 1930-1944 and Foreign Relations Between the U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean States, 1930-1944 and Federal Surveillance of the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño
• Avalon Project - A project of Yale Law School which provides digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government.
• British Online Archives - Provide access to digitized copies of archives held in Britain, with a detailed finding aid for each archive. Includes material on the Americas.
• Caribbean History and Culture, 1535-1920 - Imprints from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Includes books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides, and ephemera.
• Colecciones Mexicanas - Historical documents, archives, photos, video from a collaboration of Mexican institutions.
• Colonial State Papers - Colonial State Papers provides access to thousands of papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
• Confidential Print Latin America  - The Confidential Print series,  has been issued by the British  Foreign and Colonial Offices since around 1820.   The files in this collection extend from the 1830s to the 1960s and cover all countries of mainland South and Central America, plus Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba.
• Digital Library of the Caribbean - A cooperative digital library from Florida International University for newspapers, photos and other historical documents from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. Duke is a contributing member of dLOC.
• Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) - Created by the U.S. intelligence community, FBIS Daily Reports offer foreign views on historical events from thousands of monitored broadcasts and publications, 1941-1974.
• Latin America in Video -
  Search across 400 original-language documentaries from some of the most important producers and independent filmmakers in Latin America.
• Latin American Travelogues - A digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-19th centuries. Presented by Brown University.
• Latin American Government Archives - A project of the U. of Texas that includes selected documents from the Presidents and ministries of 18 Latin American Countries.
• Manioc - A digital library specializing in content on the Caribbean, Amazon and the Guyana Plateau. It contains videos, ebooks, photos and other primary documents.
• National Security Archive - Contains the full text more than 35,000 declassified documents involving U.S. foreign and military policy since 1945.
• Primary Source Microfilm’s online guides - Simply a listing of microfilm collections that contain primary documents including many Latin American collections.
• Sabin Americana - Contains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's.
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery - Provides access devoted to the study and understanding of the history of slavery in America and the rest of the world from the late 15th through the early 20th century.
• World Newspaper Archive - Latin America A fully searchable collection of historical newspapers from around the globe. The Latin American Newspapers include more than 35 nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American newspapers (featuring titles from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and elsewhere).
• World Scholar - Latin America & the Caribbean - A collection of primary source documents about Latin America and the Caribbean; academic journals and news-feeds covering the region; reference articles and commentary; maps and statistics; audio and video.