Lately I have been spending quite a bit of time at our Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading and analyzing the book I mentioned before, Relationi Universali by Giovanni Botero. The good thing is, I don't necessarily even need my roommate to help me translate...the book is a description of the world (including the New World), which is easy to read! I mean, describing places and people is basically lesson #1 of any language course, and combining that with my background in Spanish gets me somewhere to around an 85% comprehension rate for this book. The even cooler thing is that we have multiple editions of this book...one from 1601, one from 1617, and one from 1623. Each version is updated with the new information the conquistadors learned in the New World. 

This is why I love studying history here so much... the history classes here require term papers to be done using primary documents. So instead of reading articles about the New World, I'm able to head on over to the Rare Book library and read a book printed in 1601 about the New World. It is a window into exactly what they thought of the New World at the time. It takes away the middlemen academics from the equation... I don't have to rely on anyone but myself to interpret the primary sources. Also, being able to apply language skills is incredibly helpful when researching Europe; if I only had English to rely on, I'd be cutting out a lot of research options. 

This is a map foldout from the book from 1623 of the New World. Sorry, I didn't feel like re-editing the photo to make it upright.

The page below discusses "In which ways our World is superior to the New one"

I think it's so cool to read books from old printing presses hundreds of years ago. I love to woodcut print art.

The "v" and "u" were the same back then in some cases...they still used the Latin alphabet more strictly at that time and hadn't quite made the complete transition to using the "u"

We have to be really careful with old books like this...You are given two foam blocks to rest the book on, and a cloth sack filled with small marbles to hold the page open.

The note below was written in the front of book. I can't understand a bit of it. I can only read the "Io" at the beginning, which means "I" in Italian...as in "I am..." But it's still cool to see notes like this.

Oh yeah, fall colors are all around campus!

So I'm enjoying this term paper on the American West and the implications of the globally expanding Catholic Church in the New World. It's the kind of thing I don't mind doing on a Saturday afternoon. 

On a sad note, Alan the Sumatran orangutan died yesterday at the Atlanta Zoo. RIP Alan. He was 43 years old. 

Well, Thanksgiving break is in two weeks. The goal is to finish my 25 page research paper on Southern Labor History in the Fulton Cotton Mills of Atlanta, to finish my 10 page research paper on the New World, and to study Econ a good bit (that class isn't going too well).