Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8): Aboriginal America
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8): Aboriginal America
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
In 1789 an anonymous _Bibliotheca Americana_ of nearly sixteen hundred
entries was published in London. It is not of much value. Harrisse
and others attribute it to Reid; but by some the author’s name is
differently given as Homer, Dalrymple, and Long.[11]
An enumeration of the documentary sources (about 152 entries) used by
Muñoz in his _Historia del nuevo mundo_ (1793) is given in Fustér’s
_Biblioteca Valenciana_ (ii. 202-234) published at Valencia in
1827-1830.[12]
There is in the Library of Congress (Force Collection) a copy of an
_Indice de la Coleccion de manuscritos pertinecientes a la historia de
las Indias_, by Fraggia, Abella, and others, dated at Madrid, 1799.[13]
In the Sparks collection at Cornell are two other manuscript
bibliographies worthy of notice. One is a _Biblioteca Americana_, by
Antonio de Alcedo, dated in 1807. Sparks says his copy was made in 1843
from an original which Obadiah Rich had found in Madrid.[14]
Harrisse says that another copy is in the Carter-Brown Library; and
he asserts that, excepting some additions of modern American authors,
it is not much improved over Barcia’s edition of Pinelo. H. H.
Bancroft[15] mentions having a third copy, which had formerly belonged
to Prescott.
The other manuscript at Cornell is a _Bibliotheca Americana_, prepared
in twelve volumes by Arthur Homer, who had intended, but never
accomplished, the publication of it. Sparks found it in Sir Thomas
Phillipps’s library at Middlehill, and caused the copy of it to be
made, which is now at Ithaca.[16]
In 1808 Boucher de la Richarderie published at Paris his _Bibliothèque
universelle des voyages_,[17] which has in the fifth part a critical
list of all voyages to American waters. Harrisse disagrees with Peignot
in his favorable estimate of Richarderie, and traces to him the errors
of Faribault and later bibliographers.
The _Bibliotheca Hispano-Americana_ of Dr. José Mariano Beristain de
Souza was published in Mexico in 1816-1821, in three volumes. Quaritch,
pricing it at £96 in 1880, calls it the rarest and most valuable of
all American bibliographical works. It is a notice of writers who were
born, educated, or flourished in Spanish America, and naturally covers
much of interest to the historical student. The author did not live to
complete it, and his nephew finished it.
In 1818 Colonel Israel Thorndike, of Boston, bought for $6,500 the
American library of Professor Ebeling, of Germany, estimated to contain
over thirty-two hundred volumes, besides an extraordinary collection
of ten thousand maps.[18] The library was given by the purchaser to
Harvard College, and its possession at once put the library of that
institution at the head of all libraries in the United States for the
illustration of American history. No catalogue of it was ever printed,
except as a part of the General Catalogue of the College Library issued
in 1830-1834, in five volumes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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