The Our Americas Archive Partnership is a collaboration between MITH’s Early Americas Digital Archive and Rice University’s Americas Archive, Rice’s Humanities Research Center, Rice’s Fondren Library and the library at Instituto Mora in Mexico. Its goal is to make digitally available texts written in or about the Americas that represent the full range and complexity of a multilingual “Americas” including Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
The partnership between Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive (1492-1820) and Rice’s Americas collection (1811-1920) creates unique new research and teaching opportunities. The point of convergence between the Maryland and Rice archives is the cultural transformation created by the revolutions for independence that took place over a span of fewer than sixty years. The archive, however, spans the five hundred year period that saw the making of modern and colonial cultures in the Americas. Because of its range, the archive promises to reinvigorate the study of American literary and cultural history by creating surprising juxtapositions, emphasizing different models of periodization, and suggesting new avenues of cross-cultural influence.
The archive fosters new research that examines American literatures from a hemispheric perspective, develops a collection of texts, curricular models and teaching materials that embody a hemispheric approach to the study of the early Americas, and generates professional and intellectual exchanges among scholars from various fields.
The list of participating people on this page is only a partial list—the full set of acknowledgements for the project can be found on the project website.