November 2017
Embark on a Journey in Print with inJCB!
The Library is pleased to announce the publication of its print newsletter, inJCB. Learn about new scholarly initiatives, additions to the collections, and much more. Meet some of the people from around the world who make the JCB community so special.

JCB Fellowship Opportunities
Would your research benefit from an extended time working with JCB curators and other scholars exploring the Library’s Americana collections? Become a JCB fellow for two to ten months and join a unique scholarly network of more than 1,000 researchers who have held prestigious JCB fellowships.


The deadline to apply is December 1, 2017.


Watts Program Explores Writing and Printing by Native American and Indigenous Authors
The Library is excited to announce this year’s kick-off event for the Charles H. Watts II Program in the History and Culture of the Book, a program that connects college students to the JCB collections and provides instruction on book history and print culture in the Americas. This year, the Watts program will highlight writing and printing by Native American and Indigenous authors. In partnership with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown, we invite you to a lecture on Thursday, November 2 by Mike Kelly, Head of Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College’s Frost Library. He will discuss Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan tribe in southeastern Connecticut, who in 1772 became the first Native American author to publish his own book — A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian — as well as the printing history of Occom’s sermon.

We encourage undergraduate and graduate students in Rhode Island to attend a workshop the following day, from 3-5 pm at the JCB, with Mike Kelly and Laura Braunstein, Digital Humanities Librarian at Dartmouth College, on Occom’s sermon, descriptive bibliography, and the ways that digitized resources and print materials can help us understand the early American period. Students who would like to attend the workshop should email [email protected] to register.
Video: Larrie Ferreiro’s Brothers at Arms Lecture
Last month, the JCB hosted Larrie Ferreiro, author of Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It , which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in History this year. Ferreiro’s work re-envisions the American Revolution within a global context and details the financial and military support of France and Spain that secured American victory. He detailed how the American cause could not have succeeded without the extensive military and financial support of the French and Spanish, and demonstrated how the uprising was aided by an international coalition fighting against a common enemy – the British.

Meet Fellow Elizabeth González Jiménez
Elizabeth González Jiménez is a fifth-year PhD student in History at the University of Miami. With support from her advisor, former JCB Fellow Martin Nesvig (National Endowment for the Humanities, 2007-08), she is researching and writing her dissertation project, “Unruly Women: Power, Politics, and Punishment in Eighteenth Century New Spain.” As the recipient of a Ruth and Lincoln Ekstrom Fellowship earlier this year, González Jiménez consulted the JCB collections to research the relationship between gender, law and justice, focusing on crimes perpetrated by women as a window onto day-to-day gender relations and racial and ethnic conflicts in public and private spaces. In particular, she sought records of laws written by men that circumscribed female behavior as well as texts such as the Vida, y virtudes heroycas de la madre Maria de Jesus… (Life and Heroic Virtues of Mother Maria de Jesus), which described ideal female behavior.

As we commemorate Veterans’ Day later this month, we also add a footnote to González Jiménez’s dossier: After departing the JCB in August, Elizabeth was deployed to Iraq, where she is now stationed. We recognize with gratitude her sacrifices in the Armed Services and hope that her scholarly career is buoyed by her extraordinary dedication and service to others.
Newly Digitized: Plantes Usuelles des Brasiliens (Paris, 1824)
This beautiful botanical guide to the flora of Brazil, composed by French explorer and botanist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, captivated one of the JCB’s rare book digitization technicians, Donna Dorvick. She painstakingly scanned the rare guide and uploaded it to the JCB’s collections on the Internet Archive ; it is now universally accessible in all its glory. Purchased just this past year to commemorate the bicentenary of Saint-Hilaire’s initial journey to Brazil (1817-1820), the text – primarily in French with botanical classifications of plants in both Latin and Portuguese – and precisely detailed drawings of plants, both informative and beautiful, are available for all to see. We invite you to page through the digital copy .

The JCB is diligently working to make its entire collection freely accessible online to people from around the world. In recent years, the Library has invested in scanning technology and the employment of full-time digitization technicians to make this goal a reality. The Library has digitized more than twenty percent of its collections and is on pace to digitize more than 500,000 images this year, but we have much more to do.