News

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...

Congratulations to former fellow Pablo M. Sierra Silva for the publication of his book, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531-1706 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico is a social and cultural history of Spaniards' imposition of slavery on...

Congratulations to former fellow Christian J. Koot (Jeannette D. Black Memorial Fellow, 2011-12) on the publication of his book A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake (New York University Press, December 2017). The map in question, Virginia and Maryland as it is...

This image is a plate from “Paysage d’une partie de l’Ile de S. Christofle, avec un Crayon du Chasteau de Mr. le General” from Charles de Rochefort’s Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amerique (Rotterdam: 1681). John Carter Brown purchased the book in 1854 from...

From his earliest purchases, John Carter Brown incorporated materials on slavery and the slave trade into his Americana library. The JCB's collection hosts many rare materials that speak to the history and legacy of slavery. Researchers seeking records of the slave trade often consult our...