Gendering Latin American Independence: Women's Political Culture and the Textual Construction of Gender 1790-1850

Much of the source material was obtained from national and private libraries during research visits to Chile, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador, and to libraries in the UK, notably the British Library and Cambridge University Libraries. The majority of the sources are books and newspapers, but there are also letters, pamphlets and documents. The age and fragility of the primary sources meant that digital photographs (without flash) were taken rather than scanning or photocopying most of the material. Permission to take these photographs was readily given at all of the institutions. Staff at the Sala Medina, in the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile stipulated that acknowledgement must be given on all sources taken from their collection. As the quality of the digital photographs is insufficiently high to obtain OCR, the texts then have to be typed into the database. It has been possible to scan some short texts and extracts from later editions of books found in UK university libraries and from photocopies (where allowed) obtained from Latin American and UK libraries. The primary institutions used are The British Library; The Centre of Latin American Studies Library, Mill Lane Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, especially the collections in the Sala Medina and the Sala de Investigaciones; Instituto Riva-Agüero, Lima, the library of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú; Biblioteca de Banco Central de Ecuador, especially the private collection Fondo Jijón y Caamaño; the Archivo Nacional de Colombia, Bogota; the Biblioteca Nacional and Archivo Nacional de Argentina, Buenos Aires; the Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janiero.