Hesburgh Library
102 Hesburgh Library
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
(574) 631-8676
ehosselk@nd.edu
Starting Points: Overviews
Starting Points: Books
The Barbarous Years by
Bernard Bailyn gives us a compelling account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard. They were a mixed multitude--from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland. They moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures, and under different auspices and circumstances. Even the majority that came from England fit no distinct socioeconomic or cultural pattern. They came from all over the realm, from commercialized London and the southeast; from isolated farmlands in the north still close to their medieval origins; from towns in the Midlands, the south, and the west; from dales, fens, grasslands, and wolds. They represented the entire spectrum of religious communions from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Puritan Calvinism and Quakerism. They came hoping to re-create if not to improve these diverse lifeways in a remote and, to them, barbarous environment. But their stories are mostly of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and recapture lost worlds. And in the process they tore apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded. Later generations, reading back into the past the outcomes they knew, often gentrified this passage in the peopling of British North America, but there was nothing genteel about it. Bailyn shows that it was a brutal encounter--brutal not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves. All, in their various ways, struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured people, and felt themselves threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. In these vivid stories of individual lives--some new, some familiar but rewritten with new details and contexts--Bailyn gives a fresh account of the history of the British North American population in its earliest, bitterly contested years.
Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World by
Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World brings together ten essays exploring the outcomes of the intermingling of people, circulation of goods, and exposure to new ideas that are the hallmark of the early modern Atlantic. Spanning the period from the earliest French crossings to Newfoundland to the end of the wars of independence in Spanish South America, the contributors direct particular attention to regions, communities, and groups whose activities in, and responses to, an ever-more closely bound Atlantic world remain under-represented in the literature. All share a central concern to explore the myriad ways in which ordinary people - through their own travels, relationships, and day-to-day choices - engaged with, and contributed to, the changes set in motion as the Atlantic world came into being.
Collecting Across Cultures by
In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes--personal, imperial, missionary, or trade--and moved not only across space but also across cultures. Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another. The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge--some factual, some fictional--about distant peoples in an increasingly transnational world.
Networks and Trans-Cultural Exchange by
Winner of the 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title AwardThis volume offers the first set of essays on slave trading in the South Atlantic. These studies show that the Angola-Brazil complex was not the single commercial axis in this region and that Portuguese-Brazilian merchants were not alone in this business.
Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World by
The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of Atlantic history from c.1450 to c.1850, offering a wide-ranging and authoritative account of the movement of people, plants, pathogens, products, and cultural practices - to mention some of the key agents - around and within theAtlantic basin. As a result of these movements, new peoples, economies, societies, polities, and cultures arose in the lands and islands touched by the Atlantic Ocean, while others were destroyed. The team of scholars in this volume seek to describe, explain, and, occasionally, challenge conventional wisdom concerning these path-breaking developments. They demonstrate connections, explore contrasts, and probe themes. During the four centuries encompassed by this collection, pan-Atlantic websof association emerged that progressively linked people, objects, and beliefs across and within the region. Events in one corner of the Atlantic world had effects, reverberations thousands of miles away. The great virtue of thinking in Atlantic terms is that it encourages broad perspectives,unexpected comparisons, trans-national orientations, and expanded horizons; the parochialism that characterizes so much history writing and instruction today, as in the past, has a chance of being overcome.
Princeton Companion to Atlantic History by
Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connections among Africa, the Americas, and Europe transformed world history--through maritime exploration, commercial engagements, human migrations and settlements, political realignments and upheavals, cultural exchanges, and more. This book, the first encyclopedic reference work on Atlantic history, takes an integrated, multicontinental approach that emphasizes the dynamics of change and the perspectives and motivations of the peoples who made it happen. The entries--all specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of leading scholars--synthesize the latest scholarship on central themes, including economics, migration, politics, war, technologies and science, the physical environment, and culture. Part one features five major essays that trace the changes distinctive to each chronological phase of Atlantic history. Part two includes more than 125 entries on key topics, from the seemingly familiar viewed in unfamiliar and provocative ways (the Seven Years' War, trading companies) to less conventional subjects (family networks, canon law, utopias). This is an indispensable resource for students, researchers, and scholars in a range of fields, from early American, African, Latin American, and European history to the histories of economics, religion, and science. The first encyclopedic reference on Atlantic history Features five major essays and more than 125 alphabetical entries Provides essential context on major areas of change: Economies (for example, the slave trade, marine resources, commodities, specie, trading companies) Populations (emigrations, Native American removals, blended communities) Politics and law (the law of nations, royal liberties, paramount chiefdoms, independence struggles in Haiti, the Hispanic Americas, the United States, and France) Military actions (the African and Napoleonic wars, the Seven Years' War, wars of conquest) Technologies and science (cartography, nautical science, geography, healing practices) The physical environment (climate and weather, forest resources, agricultural production, food and diets, disease) Cultures and communities (captivity narratives, religions and religious practices) Includes original contributions from Sven Beckert, Holly Brewer, Peter A. Coclanis, Seymour Drescher, Eliga H. Gould, David S. Jones, Wim Klooster, Mark Peterson, Steven Pincus, Richard Price and Sophia Rosenfeld, and many more Contains illustrations, maps, and bibliographies
Science and Empire in the Atlantic World by
'Science and Empire in the Atlantic World' examines the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. It captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterised the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world.
The Unending Frontier - an Environmental History of the Early Modern World by
It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reach and their numbers as never before. In the process, they were intervening in the world's natural environment in equally unprecedented and dramatic ways. A sweeping work of environmental history, The Unending Frontier offers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period. John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity. The Unending Frontier considers each of these trends in a series of case studies, sometimes of a particular place, such as Tokugawa Japan and early modern England and China, sometimes of a particular activity, such as the fur trade in North America and Russia, cod fishing in the North Atlantic, and whaling in the Arctic. Throughout, Richards shows how humans whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own."
Databases to locate articles and book reviews
Individual Journals
Atlantic StudiesWilliam and Mary QuarterlyInternational Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia, & Oceania, 1750-1993 by 
International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750-2005 by
International Historical Statistics; Europe 1750-2005 is the latest edition of the most authoritative collection of statistics available. Updated to 2005 wherever possible, it provides key economic and social indicators for European countries over the last 255 years, serving as an essential reference source.
International Historical Statistics: The Americas 1750-1988 by 
Provides electronic access to the United Kingdom's Colonial, Dominion and Foreign Offices' confidential correspondence relating to Africa between 1834 and 1966. This resource provides a searchable collection of scores of official documents and maps covering almost the entire period of European conquest and colonisation of Africa (with the exception of Egypt).
Archival Collections in the Region
Edward E. Ayer Collection on American Indians
The Newberry Library’s Edward E. Ayer Collection is one of the best in the country and one of the strongest collections on American Indians in the world. In 1911, Edward E. Ayer (1841-1927) donated more than 17,000 pieces on the early contacts between American Indians and Europeans. Ayer, a member of the first Board of Trustees, was the first donor of a great collection to the Newberry. Since then, the Ayer endowment fund has enabled the library to collect in excess of 130,000 volumes, over 1 million manuscript pages, 2,000 maps, 500 atlases, 11,000 photographs, and 3,500 drawings and paintings on the subject.
Locating Archives by Geographic Region or Type
This will direct you to the Archives and Archival research LibGuide. Click on the Archives tab to find information about and links to archives in different regions and also specialized archival repositories.
ArchiveGrid
Find over 3 million descriptions of archival materials and the locations of these historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials. Most of these materials are located at archives in the United States. For materials in European archives, see Archives Portal Europe.
Archives Portal Europe
This portal represents 28 national archives in Europe and provides information about their holdings and makes some of their materials searchable online.
WorldCat
Contains catalog records of over 45,000 libraries worldwide. The records overlap with Archive Finder (NUCMC records) but also include independently contributed records not in NUCMC. Limit search to “Archival Materials” (this will yield mixed materials, including archival materials and manuscripts).
American Historical Association's Archival Wiki
This site provides listings of archives throughout the world, subdivided by country. This listing includes contact information, holdings, access policies, and other pertinent information.
ArchiveFinder
Directory that describes more than 220,000 collections of primary-source materials located in repositories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Includes the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) and the index to the National Inventory of Documentary Sources (NIDS).
ArchivesHub
Locate unique sources held at over 220 institutions in the United Kingdom.
Consortium of European Research Libraries Portal (CERL Portal)
The CERL Portal gives access to descriptions of manuscripts of all periods and early printed materials (up to 1830) in collections in Europe, the United States and Australia.
Council of European Studies at Columbia University
Digital library of cultural artifacts in digital form.
Discovery
Find records from the National Archives and over 2,500 other archives in the United Kingdom.
MALVINE
Search for post-medieval manuscripts and letters held in European libraries, archives, documentation centers, and museums.
National Register of Archives
A comprehensive catalogue compiled from English and Scottish Archives that contains information about the nature and location of manuscripts relating to British History. This is the best resource to begin with for archival resources related to British History.
PORT: Archives in Italy
Links to national, state, municipal, commercial, institutional, academic, and trade union archives in Italy with descriptions of each.
Repositories of Primary Sources
Listing of more than 5,000 websites that describe holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources in the Unites States, Canada, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, Africa, the Near East.
Social Networks and Archival Contexts (SNAC)
This is a prototype research tool that provides researchers with convenient, integrated access to historical collections held by multiple private and public archives and libraries around the world while also setting the stage for a cooperative program for maintaining information about the people documented in the collections.
The following is a small sample fo materials held in Special Collections on topics related to the Atlantic, including visual depictions of the New World, slavery, and medicine.
Historia natural y moral de las Indias, en que se tratan de las cosas notables del cielo, y elementos, metales, plantas, y animales dellas, y los ritos, y ceremonias, leyes, y gouierno, y guerras de los Indios by
One of the first detailed and realistic descriptions of the New World. Includes descriptions of Aztec and Inca custom and history as well as of the winds, tides, rivers, and mineral resources of the New World.
Special Collections also holds the 1608 Madrid edition: Special Collections Rare Books Medium – E 141 .A185 1608.
A New and Complete American Medical Family Herbal Wherein, is Displayed the True Properties and Medical Virtues of the Plants Indigenous to the United States of America: Together with Lewis' Secret Remedy, Newly Discovered . . . by
Early medical herbal written by Samuel Henry of the Creek nation. Includes hand-colored plates and catalog of men with a subscription to this work and their preference for colored plates or not.
A Report to the Secretary of War of the United States, on Indian Affairs Comprising a Narrative of a Tour Performed in the Summer of 1820, under a Commission from the President of the United States, for the Purpose of Ascertaining, for the Use of the Gove by
Detailed first-hand account of Native American tribes presented to John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War. Includes Morse's personal observations, reports of army officers, government agents, and missionaries. Also contains an appendix with reports and passages from John Bell, descriptions of Native America schools, and speeches by Native American chiefs and white officials.
Travels in Western Africa, in the Years 1818, 19, 20, and 21, from the River Gambia, through Woolli, Bondoo, Galam, Kasson, Kaarta, and Foolidoo, to the River Niger. by
Account of Major William Gray's travels through the interior of Africa, 1818-1821. Describes the local scenery and people, including plates of native costumes, villages, local flora, and musical instruments. The last chapter addresses the issue of slavery and the nature of the African race.
Maps
America, siue India Nova: Ad magnae Gerardi Mercatoris aui vniversalis imitationem in compendium redacta. by Clements Library Map Portfolio: Europe and the Americas, 1486-1606. by
Facsimiles of 5 maps:
Untitled world map, after Claudius Ptolemy, Ulm, 1486
Untitled world map, Bernardus Sylvanus, Venice, 1511
Tabula terre nove, Martin Waldseemüller, Strassburg, 1513
Novae insulae XXVI nova tabula, Sebastian Münster, Basel, 1545
America, Jodocus Hondius, Amsterdam, 1606.
Manuscripts
American Slavery Manuscript Collection
An accumulation of 19 documents and letters, unrelated in origin, with a bearing on slavery in colonial North America and the United States, 1771-1864.
Many of the documents gathered in this collection are either slave bills of sale or estate inventories that include slaves. Seven are from Kentucky, including several from Madison County. The collection also includes several personal letters and a sample of the Arabic hand of Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, a freed slave who achieved a measure of fame during a tour of the Northeast in 1828.
Below is a simplified key to using the various parts of the library catalog
1. OneSearch is the broadest possible option. It will search the Hesburgh and partner libraries, as well as other databases and public domain sources. Unlike the other options, it even searches within individual articles. Best used when having trouble finding anything on your topic.
2. Advanced Search, which is available for both "OneSearch" and "NDCatalog," lets you narrow down searches by different categories, such as subject heading or author name. Highly recommended for better-filtered search results.
3. NDCatalog is a good medium-level searching tool. It examines records held at Notre Dame and partner institutions, such as St. Mary's, but does not look inside individual articles as "OneSearch" does.
4. Catalog Classic is an older interface, essentially built on top of Notre Dame's catalog records. Some patrons prefer the way this interface allows one to search Hesburgh collections.
5. WorldCat is a service run by another company, OCLC, which searches library catalogs across the world. This can be helpful for finding materials currently not held by Notre Dame and requesting them through interlibrary loan.
6. Databases searches the TITLE of databases themselves, not journal titles or article titles. If you don't know which database you might like to use, you can find under this tab a link to Databases by subject, which will allow you to browse all databases in, for example, English Language and Literature.
The other tools on the search interface are used less often. "Articles" searches across databases for scholarly articles, but results can be hit-or-miss. "eJournals" is a search interface strictly for the title of journals that currently offer online access. "eBooks" searches the catalog with physical holdings filtered out.
This interface is subject to change. The options above are current as of January 2017.
Search Strategies
1. Search by Subject Heading. ND Catalog, OneSearch, and WorldCat all us Library of Congress (LC) subject headings. Enter "su:" in the search box and then the subject to search by subject heading. To find the subjects, either enter keywords, use the ones suggested under "objects" in the details tabs of the library catalog record, or search the Library of Congress Authorized Headings.
su: Atlantic Ocean Region
su: Atlantic slavery
su: Africa -- Relations -- Europe
su: African Americans -- History -- To 1863
2. Search for a phrase using quotation marks (search is not case sensitive).
"early modern atlantic"
"atlantic world"
3. Search by joining different terms together using AND or OR (must be in all caps)
slavery AND "atlantic world"
community OR society
4. Truncation – use an * to search for all variations of a word
empir* to search for empire, empires, empirical
H-Atlantic – An international network for Atlantic World History from 1500 to 1800. This an interdisciplinary network for scholars who study colonial North America and the United States, Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America in a transatlantic context.
Turabian Quick Guide – Summary of principal citation styles contained in Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 8th ed. (2013) hosted on the University of Chicago Press website.
A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations by Americas
Rachel Bohlmann (US History, American Studies)
Erika Hosselkus (Curator, Latin American Collections)
Europe
Julie Tanaka (Western Europe; Curator, Rare Books and Maps)
Complete List (pdf)