A black and white image of former librarian George Parker Winship in his study

About

A private institution with a public mission, the John Carter Brown Library is an independent research library dedicated to the study of the early Americas located on the campus of Brown University.

In the mid-nineteenth-century John Carter Brown began collecting “Americana,” a term that traditionally denoted books, maps, and manuscripts related to the history of the Americas from the arrival of Europeans c. 1492 to the independence movements of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. We still embrace that term today, and indeed it’s carved over the front doors, even as the library takes an expansive view of its interpretation.

The JCB’s building, a gift from John Carter Brown’s son, opened in 1904; always focused on serving researchers, the library now offers a fellowship program that supports about 50 scholars from around the world each year; a commitment to the full digitization of the library’s collections and a digital program for supporting a dynamic environment of digital scholarship; a world-class curatorial and library staff, with professional expertise in the fields the library serves and the collections it stewards; extensive academic and public programming; and an onsite and remote research environment for anyone wishing to develop, learn, and share the complex and interconnected histories of the early Americas.

Mission

By preserving, expanding, and providing enhanced access to its world-renowned collection, the John Carter Brown Library inspires scholarship, stimulates innovative and creative engagement with its materials, and connects individuals and communities around the world with the history and culture of the early Americas.

History

John Carter Brown (1797–1874) was already a collector, from a family of readers who also collected books, when in 1846 he initiated one of the great American collections—and one of the great collections of “Americana.” That year he made three substantial purchases of books in what was a new and growing field for collecting: the early Americas. At his home on Benefit Street in Providence Rhode Island he amassed a library that was hemispheric in scope from the start. There he inspected books on a library table that is still at the JCB today and fitted them into specialized bookcases that were the model for those that still ring the JCB’s MacMillan Reading Room.

John Carter Brown’s private collection became a research library in 1904 when the building at 94 George Street, on the corner of the main green at Brown University, opened. A gift from the will of the library namesake’s son, John Nicholas Brown I, the JCB has maintained its founding focus on the western hemisphere in the 15th-19th centuries. John Carter Brown, and subsequently staff of the library, expanded the collection from books to encompass maps, atlases, Indigenous language materials, and other rare materials including manuscripts and prints such as broadsides and cartoons.

The exhibit “1846: Inventing Americana at the John Carter Brown Library,” which opened May 19, 2023 online and at the library, shares the earliest history of the library.