In the fall of 2010, Brown University students, Jean Hazel Mendoza (JHM) and Bruce Gutierrez (BG), explored an underutilized segment of the John Carter Brown Library's collection—books about the Philippine Islands. This exhibition displays some of their discoveries. Click on the buttons above for your own exploration.

This exhibition grew out of a Group Independent Study Project called “The Philippines: History and Society” in the fall of 2010, which was an introductory course on the history of the Philippines, with an emphasis on its cultural, social, political, and economic transformations. The course consisted of class discussions based on assigned readings as well as film screenings, a midterm research paper, and culminated in a special final project that involved curating this book exhibition at the John Carter Brown (JCB) Library. We explored the JCB’s amazing collection of rare texts on the Philippines. We chose to focus our exhibition on the history of printing in the Philippines, featuring early historical accounts, language books, and religious texts, all printed in the Philippines from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

It was an honor to conduct research and prepare this exhibition at the JCB, on which we gave a brief presentation at the Brown symposium “Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas.” Special thanks to our advisors Professors Evelyn Hu-DeHart and Hernando Ombao as well as Ken Ward for sharing his expertise in curating and helping us put the exhibition together. —Jean Hazel Mendoza

Exhibition may be seen in the Reading Room from December 2010 to February 2011.