Talk Celebrates Cronistas Collection

Dr. William D. Ilgen will deliver a talk entitled “Mirrors of Our American Past” at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, October 28 in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of Wilson Library. Dr. Ilgen will discuss his development of a descriptive bibliography of the library’s Bernard J. Flatow Collection of Latin American Cronistas.

Cronistas were the earliest chroniclers of European exploration, settlement, ethnography, and civilizations in colonial Spanish America. Dr. Ilgen’s bibliography marks the twentieth anniversary of the library’s acquisition of an extraordinary collection of these accounts from Mr. Flatow, an alumnus and longtime friend of the University, who spent forty years gathering it throughout North and South America and Europe.

Dr. Ilgen retired in 1999 as the Library’s Latin American and Iberian Resources Bibliographer. A Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures, he specializes in the Latin American colonial period.

Address inquiries about the availability of the bibliography to Elizabeth Chenault. Information about the Flatow Collection and the Rare Book Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill is online at: http://www.lib.unc.edu/rbc/.