Early Modern (1450 CE - 1800 CE)
Misión Santa Cruz de San Sabá
The ruins of the Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá are located in Menard, Texas. It once operated as a Spanish colonial church and military outpost. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish friars established many such structures across the Southwestern United States.
Nuestra Señora de la Bahía del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga
This church was built as part of the larger project of indigneous evangelization, in which the Spanish Crown sent missionaries along the northern border of its North American possessions to establish churches and convert the natives.
La Misión de Corpus Christi de San Antonio de la Ysleta del Sur
Although the Spanish Crown claimed possession of the modern-day US borderlands, it was not able to send many settlers to the region. As a result, the priests and missionaries stationed there often took on both religious and government responsibilities.
Edifying and curious letters of some Missioners of the Society of Jesus from foreign missions
After reaching and residing in foreign places, Christian missionaries sent different kinds of writings (letters, reports, notes, etc.) back to Europe. These writings, based on different Church orders to which missionaries belonged, are normally stored in different archives (most in Rome).
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.
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.
A Colony in Crisis: The Saint Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789
...the site’s method of limiting each translated entry to about 1000 words is a great way to foster greater engagement with these sources without being too much to handle at once.
Long Teaching Module: Inca Society
In South America in the centuries before 1500, the Peruvian coast and Andean highlands were home to a series of cultures that cultivated cotton as well as food crops. Of these, the largest empire was created by the Incas, who began as a small militaristic group and conquered surrounding groups.
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.
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.