Please visit our collaborative site Our Americas Archive Partnership

Archive Description

The Americas collection strives to represent the full range and complexity of the Americas history by bringing together key documents that examines political and cultural relationships from a hemispheric perspective. Its goal is to represent the full range and complexity of a multilingual “Americas” that includes Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America from the beginning of colonization to the present.

The Americas Digital Archive presents a sample of this collection. The digital images and electronic text of the original documents are made available to the public for research and teaching purposes. This sample online collection contains original letters and government publications such as constitutions, decrees, presidential and congressional messages, broadsides and pamphlets serving as public statements regarding the political and social events of the time.

The Americas Digital Archive project is overseen by Dr. Caroline Levander, Director of Humanities Research Center at Rice University. The Rice Americas Collection is housed at the Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library.

Research Modules

We have created several modules that elaborate on the archival documents or demonstrate their pedagogical uses in an on-line environment called Connexions. Connexions is a set of tools for developing and freely distributing educational material. Anyone can develop modules, and it is our hope that scholars and teachers at other institutions will develop their own materials using the Americas Archive. Connexions encourages collaboration among institutions and makes materials published within it accessible to anyone with internet access anywhere in the world for free. To date over one million people have used Connexions in over 150 countries.

Several of the Connexions modules that we have developed offer a more in-depth contextual introduction to certain documents in the collection. We have also created two pedagogical modules intended to demonstrate the usefulness of this digital archive to students of the Spanish language and to students studying the Mexican American War. We hope that other instructors will develop modules that demonstrate other uses of the documents or that offer more contextual background for specific artifacts.

Links to pedagogical modules

Using original documents on the Mexican American War

Using untranslated materials in research