News

One of the added benefits of inviting former JCB fellow Michael Jarvis (University of Rochester) back to the Library as a digital fellow in the summer of 2018 was not just his extraordinary rum collection from the Caribbean, which was bountifully shared with fellows at Fiering...

In May 2018, JCB fellow Matthew Nielsen led a collaboration session with JCB staff and fellows around an incredible oversized map of the Orinoco River that extends to over fourteen feet in length when fully unrolled. This manuscript chart was produced between 1802 and 1803...

At a 2018 auction in New York City, the JCB made several extraordinary acquisitions that cement the institution’s place as one of the leading repositories of colonial Mexican books and printed materials. Prime among them is our 64th Mexican incunable, book printed in Mexico from...

What would our world today be like without the anti-malarial drug quinine and its derivatives? As former JCB fellow Matt Crawford tells us, the answer is almost too terrible to contemplate. In the early 19th century, two French pharmacists isolated quinine from cinchona bark (also...

Nora Jaffary, Associates’ Fellow at the JCB and Professor of History at Concordia University, spent her two-month fellowship in February and March 2018 consulting works treating Iberian and colonial law, judges’ manuals, and published criminal cases to help her contribute to a new historiography of...

Adding to its materials related to the history of food and the environment, the Library acquired in early 2018 an extremely rare collection of directives from the British Government related to the administration of various West Indian Plantations. General orders for the government of officers...