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A Comprehensive Working Bibliography Title | Contents | Venezuela | TheCenter | Home Original
Preface and Acknowledgements This working bibliography provides a starting place for the study of Venezuelan history. As a working bibliography, it does not begin to cover everything ever written about Venezuela's past, but it does include over four thousand items that can serve as a beginning. Politics and political history are, of course, heavily represented here, but so also are economics, social history, intellectual and artistic history, and even natural history. None of these areas of interest are covered exhaustively, but most are represented by a substantial collection of references. Within this broad thematic sweep we included items ranging chronologically from preconquest indigenous societies through the most recent political and social events; from pre-Columbian artifacts through the nationalization of the oil industry. As a result, if everything ever written about Venezuela is not listed, it should be possible to find out about almost everything ever written about Venezuela through research in the items included. In a project of this kind it usually proves difficult to establish and maintain rigidly controlled search procedures. Our work was no exception. The items in this working bibliography came primarily from three different types of sources. First, of course, were the multiple volumes of the Library of Congress Catalogs of books. Second were the published catalogs of major research collections in the United States such as those at the universities of Texas, California, Tulane, Harvard, Florida; the printed catalog of the New York Public Library; and the Handbook of Latin American Studies. Third were a collection of miscellaneous sources: publishers/' catalogs, Libros en Venta, private libraries, and citations sent in by our research team in Venezuela. In general, we took a permissive attitude about including items in the bibliography. For example, we did not search for items in languages other than English or Spanish, but when such publications appeared, we included them. Likewise, we emphasized original imprints or reprints published since the Second World War and especially those published in the last twenty years. But when important items occurred with earlier publication dates, we included them. With very few exceptions, however, every reference was verified in a printed library catalog or similar standard reference, or it was checked against a copy of the item in question. By casting our net widely we increased the quantity of our catch but with the inevitable consequence of also increasing the quantity of less useful items. But because one scholar's marginalia is another's intellectual passion, we made little effort to weed out this collection, except to exclude pamphlets and journal article reprints. We also included unpublished dissertations completed on Venezuelan topics at United States institutions during the last decade. Where the title of a published work differed substantially from the dissertation title, or where there seemed some reason to suspect that the dissertation might differ from a similarly titled publication, we left the dissertation in. Here, as elsewhere, we chose to err on the side of including a superfluous item rather than excluding a useful one. Venezuela's government agencies delight in publishing quantities of information in statistical series, in reports, in speeches, and so forth. But not only does the Venezuelan Central Bank, for example, publish excellent economic data, it also issues a fine series of historical publications frequently unrelated to banking or economics. And the National Racetrack Institute has published a series of nineteenth-century traveler's accounts. Given this universal interest in history, we included the historically significant editions sponsored by a wide variety of government agencies without attempting a comprehensive listing of the agencies/' other publications. Similarly, we included the major publications resulting from each of Venezuela's republican censuses but not every publication derived from the censuses. Thus, the major population counts are here; the detailed industrial and agricultural censuses are not. Given the enormous quantity of Venezuelan history that has been written in periodical articles, we had to limit our search or this list would have been swamped by articles. Because the purpose of this working bibliography is to help guide students to information on Venezuela's past, rather than to provide a definitive list, we excluded all articles published in Venezuelan periodicals. Instead, we listed the periodicals themselves and any cumulative indexes that may exist. Other articles on Venezuelan topics, especially those in English and those published in the United States, are listed separately. We did not uncover all the articles in English on Venezuelan themes, but through the Handbook of Latin American Studies and other sources we acquired a significant sample of recent articles. This working bibliography is organized by broadly defined category and, within category, by principal author and title. Clearly, many works could easily have been included under as many as three or four of these categories, but such a cross-listing procedure would have led to a publication much larger than this one. We chose, instead, to list each item under the most appropriate category. This means, for example, that some items referring only in a peripheral way to the period 1863-1935 will not be listed under History 1863-1935, but possibly under History 1830-1863, or History Post-1935. These categories, then, are broad indications of subject area, not precise thematic classifications. Because many students may want to locate the works of individual authors, there is an index that includes all authors, or titles or institutions listed as authors. Conventions We adopted a series of conventions in preparing the
entries that are designed to make the list easier to use and more compatible
with the computer.
These conventions, while appearing complex on paper, should help students
make the most efficient use of this working bibliography. There are, however,
other conventions we followed to make this project more easily computer
compatible. The machine, while a boon to bibliographical projects, often imposes
its own stylistic requirements. In our implementation the following conventions
proved helpful for fast, efficient computer use.
For the technically inclined, the bibliography was produced through a
slightly modified version of INFOL-2, an information retrieval program, on
Indiana University's CDC 6600 computer. The Preface was prepared through
a locally written text processing program called Instep. The final
bibliography printout was prepared, headlines and page numbers added, and the
file renumbered through simple Fortran programs written by John V. Lombardi. * * * Any work of this kind must necessarily depend on the efforts of many
individuals and the support of a variety of institutions. Although it would be
impossible to list everyone who contributed to this project, some of them can be
acknowledged here. This working bibliography became possible in the first instance through a
project entitled "The Formation, Structure, and Dynamics of a Primate City:
A Case Study of Caracas, 1560-1960" under the joint direction of John V.
Lombardi [Department of History, Indiana University (IU)] and Germán Carrera
Damas [Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo (CENDES), Universidad Central de
Venezuela]. Funded by CENDES and the Midwest Universities Consortium on
International Activities (MUCIA), the project completed its first phase
(1974-1976) in May of 1976. This bibliography is one of the project's first
products and owes its existence to the support supplied from the MUCIA portion
of the project budget. Kathy M. Waldron, Robert H. Lavenda, Robert J. Ferry, and
Ralph F. Van Roy, all project researchers in Caracas during the first phase,
provided us with invaluable assistance in the compilation of this work. Jean
Hawkins Coffin worked closely with the bibliographic search at Indiana
University and provided us with greatly appreciated advice on bibliographic
sources and conventions. Most of the search and all of the data preparation took
place at the Indiana University Library and the IU Wrubel Computing Center. Roberta E. Adams did the major portion of the search, prepared the data file,
managed the computer files, and in general handled the day-to-day supervision of
the project. Without her contribution and expertise there would be no
bibliography. Although the bibliography part of the MUCIA - CENDES project was
managed under my direction at Indiana University, we benefited greatly from the
contributions of our CENDES project director, Germán Carrera Damas, who
supervised our activities in Caracas. In Venezuela, many individuals and institutions cooperated on various aspects
of this work. The Fundación John Boulton, through its Director, Manuel Pérez
Vila, offered us the use of that institution's excellent library. At the
Academia Nacional de la Historia, Carlos Felice Cardot, that institution's
secretary, gave us valuable assistance. José Antonio De Armas Chitty let us
inspect his excellent private library. Other institutions providing us with
copies of their publications or catalogs were the Sociedad Bolivariana, the
Archivo General de la Nación, the Presidencia de la República, the Biblioteca
Nacional, and the Universidad Central de Venezuela, among others. Finally,
without the enthusiastic and generous collaboration of Pedro Grases, whose
outstanding private library is a Venezuelanist bibliophile's Mecca, this
bibliography would have been significantly less comprehensive and complete than
it is. In the United States at Indiana University we have enjoyed strong support.
George M. Wilson, Dean of International Programs and chief liaison with MUCIA,
has encouraged us in this project, helping us survive crises and difficulties.
Richard C. Burke, Director of the IU Latin American Studies Program, gave us his
support and lent us the services of his office, especially the excellent
managerial skills of the Latin American Studies Secretary, Judith Lucas. Mary B.
Floyd of the IU History Department provided us with important bibliographical
information. In the IU Main Library, Emma C. Simonson, Latin American Librarian,
patiently answered a never-ending stream of questions. Her good advice and wise
counsel greatly improved the final version of this bibliography. We relied
heavily on Jean Nakhnikian of the IU Wrubel Computing Center, who maintained and
modified the programs used for this project. The assistance, advice, and hard work of these people and institutions, plus
the contributions of others too numerous to mention here, made it possible to
compile this working bibliography. Without them, we could hardly have begun. John V. Lombardi In general, this web version of Venezuelan History: A Comprehensive
Working Bibliography follows the printed version closely. The items
appearing here come from the original computer file used to produce the
camera-ready copy for the GK Hall publication in 1976. As a result, it
suffers from the same limitations as the original described above (all upper
case, no special characters or diacriticals, for example). However, this
version's index differs considerably from the original. To produce the index, this version scanned the complete list of items and
constructed an index based on the first line of each item, combining the item
numbers for multiple entries for the same author. This produces an index
that is very similar to the original with the exception that this version does
not truncate the first line at a fixed number of characters. Additionally, the on-line index has a link from the index to the item.
Clicking on an item number appearing next to an author's name in the index takes
you to that item in the correct section of the bibliography. You can
return to the index at the same place by using the browser software's [Back]
feature. The web version keeps the organization of the original in sixteen sections as
follows with with the approximate size in kilobytes indicated:
Obviously, on a slow connection (28.8kbs or
less), viewing some sections may take patience. Frequent users may choose
to download the entire set of linked files and view the bibliography from a
local storage device. This version of the bibliography is, of course, outdated as much new material
has appeared in the more than three decades since the original
publication. At the same time, historians have an enthusiasm for
bibliography, and as the original is out of print, we decided to put this
on-line for whatever utility it may have for bibliographers and students of
Venezuela's past. This electronic version owes its existence to the sponsorship from TheCenter
at the University of Florida on whose website it resides and whose support made
the various file conversions possible. John V. Lombardi |