The Getty Research Institute (GRI) has an extensive collection of online digital resources, with two portals that focus on Mexico. The first portal discussed in this article is A Nation Emerges: Sixty-five Years of Photography in Mexico, and the second portal discussed is Obsidian Mirror-Travels: Refracting Mexican Art and Archaeology. These portals are the online versions of GRI exhibitions. Viewers of A Nation Emerges: Sixty-five Years of Photography in Mexico will find numerous primary sources, mostly photographs, related to major historical events from 1857 to 1923. This will serve as a useful resource for scholars and students interested in photohistory. The online exhibition Obsidian Mirror-Travels: Refracting Mexican Art and Archaeology offers a wealth of online digitized images related to Aztec art, culture, and archaeology.
Although A Nation Emerges: Sixty-five Years of Photography in Mexico contains superb resources, the site is difficult to navigate and can result in viewers missing much of what it offers. Therefore, this article provides a road map of sorts with the goal of helping scholars and students save valuable time during the research process. This guide will greatly streamline the user experience for those navigating A Nation Emerges: Sixty-five Years of Photography in Mexico. In fact, readers may want to consider having access to this article while they are navigating the particular portal.
On the other hand, viewers will find Obsidian Mirror-Travels: Refracting Mexican Art and Archaeology much easier to navigate. As such, a general overview, rather than a detailed guide is provided for this portal to allow users to direct their research with efficiency and accuracy when navigating the site.
The article concludes with a brief discussion in the “Digitized Resources” section, of the literature, methodology, and historiography of photohistory.
Article
Jonathan Saxon
Article
Gunvor Simonsen
From the 1670s to 1917, Denmark (until 1814 Denmark–Norway) maintained colonies in the eastern Caribbean. The island of St. Thomas was colonized in 1672, St. John in 1718, and St. Croix was bought from the French in 1733. Racial slavery soon came to dominate the Danish islands and was only abolished in 1848. Most people arrived to the islands as captive Africans, while most Europeans were of either Dutch or British origin. In 1917, the islands, constituting the Danish West Indies, were sold to the United States of America and became the US Virgin Islands. As part of the centennial of 2017, commemorating the transfer of the Virgin Islands to the United States of America, major Danish cultural institutions, such as the National Archives, the Royal Library, and the National Museum, digitized large collections concerning Danish activities and Danish rule in the Caribbean, including the archive of the Danish West India and Guinea Company, the archives of local government agencies in the Caribbean, large collections of photos, drawings, and maps, as well as a significant part of the written works concerning the Danish West Indies published prior to 1917. In combination with older digital platforms, new online resources facilitate the triangulation of many different kinds of evidence, which in turn promises to generate fascinating new histories of the people who lived in the US Virgin Islands while they were under Danish rule.
