Royal Visits to the Americas: a Selected Bibliography

This bibliography has been compiled as a supplement to the sources listed at the end of my
article on "Royal Visits", which will be included in the forthcoming Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History: A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia , edited by Will Kaufman, to be published by ABC-Clio Press in February 2005. It consists of English-language materials published in commemoration of state visits made by members of the British royal family to destinations in North and South America and the Caribbean. It is divided into the following categories:

1. Souvenir books and pamphlets published in commemoration of individual visits shortly
    after the event. Items listed here are owned by the author, but many more similar items
    exist, since it is quite likely the royal visits of the Prince of Wales in the 1920s, King
    George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1939, and Queen Elizabeth II’s twenty visits to Canada
    would have inspired numerous locally produced souvenir booklets, comparable to the ones
    in my collection that were printed in various communities of the Maritime provinces of
    Canada for the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1983. With the advent of online
    new and used booksellers accessible through the book comparison site AddAll Books, as
    well as online auction sites like Ebay, it is now far easier to collect such items than would
    have been the case ten years ago.

2. Primary sources in the form of first-person accounts, and secondary sources consisting
    of scholarly books and journal articles written about individual visits, or about the topic as
    a whole, which analyze the significance of the event(s).

3. Articles from Majesty and Royalty magazines. I do not think these publications are indexed
   anywhere, and are seldom owned by libraries, so this information would be extremely hard
   to find by other means. Citations are from copies owned by me, but since I do not own full
   runs of these magazines, this list is undoubtedly lacking some stories from these publications.
   Both companies have back issues for sale, but it is often easier (and cheaper) to purchase older
   issues from the 1980s and 1990s through Ebay.

4. Videos of documentaries produced by the CBC and BBC about individual tours or which
    include footage of Canadian tours.

5. Internet sites about royal visits to the Americas.

All items listed are either from the author’s personal collection or have been borrowed from a
library via interlibrary loan for the author’s study, with the exception of books published in 1860 and 1861 about the tour by the Prince of Wales, which could not be borrowed but the existence of which was verified in library catalogs and online booksellers’ listings. It does not include articles from mass market newspapers and magazines simply because there are too many stories to be listed here. If you wish to look for such stories, a visit to a good-sized university library will enable you to look up articles about older royal visits by consulting indexes such as Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, the New York Times Index, and the Index to the Times (of London). U.S. university libraries will also likely have access to Lexis-Nexis, which is a database that provides access to full-text newspaper articles from the Americas and the United Kingdom for the past twenty years. It is particularly useful for finding coverage of events about royal visits in daily newspapers from larger cities visited by individual members of the royal family. Newspapers on microfilm from cities honored with earlier visits can often be obtained via interlibrary loan, but since they are frequently not indexed, you will need to know the dates you are looking for to request the appropriately dated reels, and then look through them to find stories.

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