Summary

The Latin American Travelogues Digital Collection is composed of 327 travel accounts, most written in English but some in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian. All were produced between the 16th and the early 20th centuries. The digital collection, organized beginning in 2006 under the direction of James N. Green, the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Latin American History at Brown University, and Patricia Figueroa, the Curator of the Iberian and Latin American Collection, is a project of the Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship. The site is an open-access visual and research tool for students and scholars alike. The Latin American Travelogues Digital Collection was created to encourage students to use primary sources about Latin America and the Caribbean for research projects and essay assignments and to facilitate access to rare books through the Internet. It has proven successful in integrating Brown’s Latin American Special Collections into classroom pedagogy and promoting these works as a research tool for both undergraduate and graduate students. The project is also designed to make these travelogues freely available to researchers worldwide and to preserve these works for future generations of scholars.