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France in the Americas
France in the Americas is a collaborative bilingual digital library (French – English) which is the fruit of the cooperation between the National Library of France and 18 French, Canadian, American, and British cultural institutions and universities. With a first phase dedicated to the French presence in North America between the 16th century and 1900, France in the Americas is part of the Shared Heritage collection.
This website is being produced in two stages. Phase 1, which is dedicated to North America, is already available online. It will soon be completed with the addition of a second section focusing on the West Indies and French Guiana between 1630 and 1945.
A contextualised collection
Phase 1 gives access to more than 2000 documents, which have been contextualised by sixty previously unpublished texts written by French, Canadian and American specialists. Articles and documents are distributed under 6 thematic accesses:
The origin of France in the Americas
The digital library France in the Americas is a collective venture. Along with the two historic partners, the Library of Congress (LOC) and the National Library of France, there are many other cultural institutions and universities involved, including:
- Archives nationales d’Outre-mer (ANOM)
- Bibliothèque et Archives Canada/Library and Archives Canada (BAC/LAC)
- Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BANQ)
- Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles
- Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux
- Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
- British Library
- Columbia University Library
- Dictionnaire biographique du Canada/Dictionary of Canadian biography (DBC/DCB)
- Harvard Library
- Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC)
- Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University
- John Carter Brown Library (JCB)
- National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
- New-York Public Library (NYPL)
- Princeton University Library
- Réseau canadien de documentation pour le recherche/Canadian Research Knowledge Network (RCDR/CRKN)
The idea for this website originated from a previous joint initiative of the National Library of France and the Library of Congress called France in America / La France en Amérique. The change of the singular “America” to the plural “Americas” is not simply intended to differentiate the websites; it also marks an extension of the geographical and chronological limits of the project, as well as the opening of the project to all institutions whose collections are of potential interest and to the contribution of many different researchers.
