Bancroft Library Microfilm: Portugal and her Empire

Published Occasionally by the Friends of the Bancroft Library

the busy market place, a bull fight ring, and the absence of women in public places. Then on to Chagres, where in the midst of many men waiting in rooms or in tents outside the city for the next steamer, he encountered five American ladies, Mrs. Fremont thin as a ghost among them." He described the local food, in particular a Spanish dish of "flour, onions, tomatoes and molasses well blended. I...

Catholic Charity in Perspective: The Social Life of Devotion in Portugal and its Empire (1450-1700)

This article tries to outline the major differences between practices of charity within Europe, either comparing Catholics to Protestants, or different Catholic areas. The point of departure is constituted by the study of the Misericórdias, lay confraternities under royal protection who would develop as one of the main (if not the greatest) dispensers of charity either in Portugal or its Empire...

Microfilm Service Units

Racism, Empire and Sociology

‘[T]he entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out.’ So wrote Mary Louise Pratt, at the start of Imperial Eyes (1992: 6), her insightful account of colonial travelogue. Pratt’s point provides a pithy summary of one of the central claims of what was, at the time, the still emerging field of postcolonial studies (in which context, of course, Imperial Ey...

Newspaper Headlines Extraction from Microfilm Images

Automatic indexing is important for a digital library to provide digitized manuscripts of old document images and their electronic text. As an essential step in creating such a system, this paper discusses the issue of extracting headlines from old newspaper microfilms. Most research on document layout analysis has largely assumed relatively clean images. However microfilm images of old newspap...