Mexico in History
Colonialism to Revolution, c.1500-1929
Mexico in History is an essential resource illuminating the country’s past, from Spanish contact with Indigenous communities, through colonial rule, Independence, and the National and Reforma periods, and the onset of the Revolution.
This important collection invites students and researchers to explore hundreds of years of Mexico’s history through social, religious, and political change. These unique and highly significant archival materials from Mexico are predominantly Spanish as well as including Indigenous languages, with translated metadata.
Drawn from The Bancroft Library's Latina Americana Collection, one of the world’s foremost repositories for historical and contemporary research on Mexico and Central America, the collection includes rare manuscripts and stunning visual materials, including maps, photographs, illustrations, and graphic art.
Highlights
- Bancroft Collection of Sermons containing a significant collection of sermons ranging from c.1650s-c.1850s
- Collection of works published by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, chiefly illustrated by José Guadalupe Posada representing a wonderful collection of Mexican chapbooks, broadsides, single-fold pamphlets, handbills, and other printed ephemera. Topics covered in this very visual collection include death in art, festivals, Mexican wit and humour, the Revolution, social life and customs
- Indigenous language materials offering a diverse range of linguistic content including Nahuatl, Otomi, Tzeltal, Zoque, Pima, Ópata, O’odham, Seri, Mazahua, Pame, and Nahua-Mixtec pictoglyphs
- Mexican Inquisition Records representing a major collection of Inquisitorial trials and other documents covering some of the most significant cases brought before the Inquisition, with materials outlining charges for blasphemy, relapsed practising Judaism, witchcraft, superstition, bigamy, and other investigations and proceedings
- “My Recollections of Maximilian” providing captivating insights into the nineteenth-century reign of Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota in Mexico, written by a daughter of one of Carlota’s ladies-in-waiting
Included in
Key data
Period covered
c.1500-1929
Source archive
- The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
- Colonial administration
- Colonialism and Colonial Mexico
- Everyday life
- Indigenous communities, history, persecution, and language and linguistics
- The Inquisition, accusations, and criminal proceedings
- National and international politics
- The National Period
- Religion, missionaries, and the Catholic Church
- Resistance, Independence, reform, and revolution
- War and military conflict
- Circulars, laws, and decrees
- Correspondence
- Financial records
- Government documents
- Illustrations
- Inquisition records
- Land grants
- Legal papers
- Linguistic vocabularies and essays
- Maps
- Newspaper clippings
- Notes
- Pamphlets/leaflets/ broadsides
- Personal papers
- Photographs
- Religious sermons
- José Adrián Barragán-Álvarez, Bancroft Library
- Matthew Butler, University of Texas at Austin
- Margaret Chowning, UC Berkeley
- Miguel Enrique Soto Estrada, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
- Caterina Luigia Pizzigoni, Columbia University
- Yanna Yannakakis, Emory University
- Communities, Peoples and Nations
- Latin American Studies
- Religious Studies
- War and Conflict
- Enhanced platform search capabilities
- Translated metadata