Browse Primary Sources

Locate primary sources, including images, objects, media, and texts. Annotations by scholars contextualize sources.

Negro Slavery Described by a Negro

Ashton Warner lived in the British Caribbean colony of Saint Vincent in the early 1800s. He was raised free before being re-enslaved at the age of ten. In this passage, he describes his experience laboring on a sugar plantation. Although Warner was not forced to labor in the cane fields, he describes his horror at the prospect that he might need to complete that work.

Old color map of north and south America, with a distorted view of North America.

The World: Map of N. & S. America

Matthaeus Seutter was an acclaimed German mapmaker in the early eighteenth century. He published maps that introduced the geography of the Americas to many people who would never set foot on the continents themselves. The drawings on the upper left and lower left of this map represent many of the things that Seutter—and other Europeans—prized in the New World.

Handwritten black ink recipe written in a paragraph format.

Ginger bread recipe

This late-seventeenth century recipe for gingerbread shows how colonization in the Atlantic world changed what men and women in England would have eaten. The recipe includes ginger and sugar. While both of these commodities were known by Europeans prior to Columbus’s journeys to the New World, they were often grown on Caribbean plantations for export to Europe.

Teatro Nacional Cervantes

The Cervantes Theater is located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, near the historically aristocratic zone of Recoleta. Actress María Guerrero and her husband Fernando Díaz de Mendoza played a major role in the establishment of this theater, which was officially inaugurated on September 5, 1921.

Uruguayan Jail Cell Door

The nation of Uruguay was ruled by a military dictatorship from 1973 to 1986. During this period, harsh military regimes dominated many South and Central American countries. For more than a decade in Uruguay, government and military officials committed countless acts of kidnapping, imprisonment, and execution.

Maguire Residence

This mansion is one of the last remaining palace-like residences in Buenos Aires. It was built in the 1890s on a street with many other similar homes, Avenida Alvear. Many of these extravagant houses have been demolished or converted into hotels.

Front and back of aged coins. One side has a side profile of a person and the other has an insignia.

Coin minted by Constantine

Constantine erected large monuments to his rule, most notably the Arch of Constantine in Rome, but he also portrayed his religious sentiments and celebrated his reign in smaller ways, through coins and portraits. This is a copper alloy coin, minted in Constantinople in 327, the type of coin that ordinary people would have used for business transactions.

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Selections from Eusebius, Life of Constantine

The most important record that remains of Constantine’s life is a biography written shortly after his death by the historian and Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 263–339 ?), a close adviser to Constantine.

Constantinian Edicts

Many of the records that survive from Constantine’s reign are official edicts and proclamations, written on papyrus and parchment. This is a series of edicts issued by Constantine regarding religion, beginning with the original edict of toleration from 311 signed by three of the then four rulers of the Roman Empire: Lactantius, Licinius, and Constantine.

Speculum Historiale by Vincent of Beauvais

Earlier accounts of Charlemagne’s life, rife with positive bias though many may be, pale in comparison to the heavily legendary account present in the thirteenth century’s memory of Charlemagne. By the time that the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais wrote his Speculum Historiale (Historical Mirror), the figure of Charlemagne had become infused with the stuff of legend and myth.

Deeds of Emperor Charles the Great

Later in the 9th century, Notker “the Stammerer” of St.-Gall wrote his Gesta Karoli Magni Imperatoris (Deeds of Emperor Charles the Great). He dedicated the work to Charlemagne’s great-grandson Charles the Fat (r. 876-888), a son of Louis the German, and indeed, Notker intended the work, at least in part, to serve as an exempla for Charles the Fat on the proper way to rule a kingdom.

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Excerpts from the Vita Karoli Magni

Let us investigate the work of Charlemagne’s courtier Einhard, the Vita Karoli Magni, or Life of Charles the Great, which was composed during the reign of Louis the Pious, probably during the long decade from around 817-830. Einhard owed his position at court to Charlemagne, and he continued to serve Charles’s son and successor, Louis the Pious, after Charlemagne’s death.

Drawing shows two people harvesting grain and and one carrying it away in bushels

Illustrations from Guaman Poma, El Primer Nueva Coránica y Buen Gobierno

These two illustrations come from El Primer Nueva Coránica y Buen Gobierno [The First New Chronicle and Good Government] (1615), a history of the Inca Empire and the Spanish conquest of the Andes written and illustrated by Filipe Guaman Poma y Ayala, an indigenous Peruvian Christian noble. The book is written primarily in Spanish, with some Quecha words.

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Extract from Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru

This is an extract from the chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noble woman, who grew up in Peru but left there as a young man and spent the rest of his life in Spain. His descriptions of the laws and actions of the Incas are based on oral traditions that he had heard as a child, along with some earlier written chronicles.

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Extract from Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru

This is an extract from the chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noble woman, who grew up in Peru but left there as a young man and spent the rest of his life in Spain. His descriptions of the laws and actions of the Incas are based on oral traditions that he had heard as a child, along with some earlier written chronicles.

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Extract from Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru

This is an extract from the chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noble woman, who grew up in Peru but left there as a young man and spent the rest of his life in Spain. His descriptions of the laws and actions of the Incas are based on oral traditions that he had heard as a child, along with some earlier written chronicles.

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Pedro de Cieza de León, Crónicas

This is an extract from the chronicles of Pedro de Cieza de León (1520–1554), a Spanish soldier and writer who compiled a history of Peru during his seventeen years there. It describes the taxes and labor obligations the Incas imposed on the people they conquered, including payments of grain, cloth, weapons, coca, and animals, along with labor in mines and fields.

Report from the General Inspection of the Chupaychu

This is a report from a Spanish inspector dating from 1549, written by a European scribe, based on an Andean’s reading of a khipu, the collections of cords on which Incas recorded information. It comes from the Huallaga Valley, an area that had put up strong resistance to Spanish rule and had been conquered only in 1542.

A series of long, multi-colored strings hanging from another string. The hanging strings have knots at varying places along each string.

Inca Khipu

Andean peoples, including the Incas, recorded information on khipus (also spelled quipu), collections of colored and knotted cords such as this one. Khipus seem to have primarily recorded financial and labor obligations, the output of fields, population levels, land transfers, and other numerical records.

Juan de Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas

This extract comes from Juan de Betanzos’ Narrative of the Incas, which was written in the sixteenth century but not published until 1880. Betanzos (1510-1576) was among the early conquistadors, and served as a military leader and official. He married Cuxirimay Ocllo, the chief wife of King Atahualpa, the last Inca Emperor.