News

In collaboration with the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, the JCB welcomed a spectacular group of scholars of slavery to Providence in June 2018. With panel topics ranging from kidnapping and print-culture to medicine and indigenous slavery, participants came together in an...

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...