"Marcos Jiménez de la Espada" archive from Tomás Navarro Tomás Library

Marcos Jiménez de la Espada (1831-1898) was a prominent Americanist historian who participated in the Pacific Scientific Commission (1862), an expedition to study the American landscape and enrich Spanish museums. Throughout his career, he held important positions and received numerous awards for his work.

The initial collection was probably deposited in 1936 in the library of the Center for Historical Studies of the Board for the Expansion of Scientific Studies and Research. The archive was housed there through the personal efforts of his son, Gonzalo Jiménez de la Espada, a teacher trained at the Free Institution of Education. As a collaborator of the Board for the Expansion of Studies (JAE), he had an office in the building of the Center for Historical Studies (CEH) at the outbreak of the Civil War. When he left Madrid during the war, this archive remained in its premises and was possibly divided into several sections. In 2010, this archive became part of the Archive of the Center for Human and Social Sciences, part of the Tomás Navarro Tomás Library.

The textual collection, comprising working notes, correspondence, and drafts of scientific and historiographical articles, was attached to the Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo Center Library and used by various researchers during the second half of the 20th century, suffering successive losses. The iconographic collection was hidden in a duplicate room, reappearing in 1995. In 2002, six boxes of documents from this collection were identified among the Manuscript Collection files of the General Library of Humanities.

This archive, with 2,455 records, contains textual material (correspondence, newspapers, working notes, originals and publications, invitations, official documents, and diaries) and iconographic material (photographs, plates, and drawings). It covers the following subjects: Anthropology of Native Americans, American Art and Architecture, American Fauna and Flora, Scientific Commission for the Pacific, Commission for the Study of the Boundaries between Venezuela and Colombia, Geography and History of the Americas, Natural History, and Vocabularies of Native Americans.

Two datasets are shared containing information corresponding to the Marcos Jiménez de la Espada Archive, housed at the Archive of the Center for Human and Social Sciences of the CSIC (CCHS-CSIC) in the Tomás Navarro Tomás Library. The selected data were obtained through queries performed on ALMA, the library management system currently used by the CSIC. The files "MJE_Ejemplares_bibliografico_completo.xlsx" and "MJE_Ejemplares_bibliografico_completo.csv" contain the combined bibliographic and item data for this archive. Both files contain the same information in two different formats for easy reuse.

• From 1849-12-31 23:45 to 1897-12-31 23:45

Recommended citation: Cita recomendada: Tomás Navarro Tomás library; 2025; Digitization of the collection "Marcos Jiménez de la Espada" from Tomás Navarro Tomás Library [DATASET]; DIGITAL.CSIC; https://doi.org/XXXXXXXX