An American archive: the vast collection of Venezuelan entrepreneur Pedro Manuel Arcaya is a comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick

The Arcaya Collection of more than 147,000 volumes was once the largest private library in Latin America. Until his death in 1958, when the collection was given to the National Library of Venezuela. Pedro Manuel Arcaya--lawyer, sociologist, historian, and politician--had amassed a library of incalculable value which included not only books but manuscripts, newspapers, magazines, archival documents, pamphlets, leaflets, and maps. This special library within the National Library offers an iconographic wealth that reflects the immensely wide vision and life-long dedication of its collector. The collection is clearly defined in its direction: it has Venezuela as its central focus and then expands geographically and temporally to encompass all of the Americas over the past 500 years, and then again to a wider but essentially European past and longer temporal focus. It includes first-hand narratives of discovery and conquest; chronicles of adventurers, missionaries, pirates, traders, religious and scientific explorers; studies of indigenous peoples and civilizations; histories and personal remembrances of the wars of independence of the American republics, their emerging histories, and the political philosophies associated with them; accounts of conflicting boundary claims and disputes; judicial commentaries; and reports of the dealings of the Americas with the widening world.

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Pedro Manuel Arcaya (1874-1958), scion of a wealthy, traditional family, was born and raised in the colonial town of Coro (now a UNESCO World Heritage site). He received his legal degree in 1890 and his doctorate degree in political science from the Central University of Venezuela in 1895. Parallel to the life-long trajectory of his legal and political career, which included state senator, attorney general of the republic, drafter of the national civil code and the code of criminal procedure, and eventually ambassador to the United States (1930-1935), be conducted a series of studies on the history, ethnography, sociology, and linguists of Venezuela and perused what was to engage him until his death--the collection and formation of his library.

As a journalist and public intellectual, he formed, along with José Gil Fortoul, Laureano Lanz Vallenilla, and others, what was known as "Venezuelan positivist generation," positivist intellectuals who were essentially apologists for the governments of dictator Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935), and tent a certain...