Borah Collection

The Borah Collection, named after Prof. Woodrow W. Borah, focuses on the history and civilization of Latin America, and was donated to the Sverdlin Institute for Latin American History and Culture.

The collection, based on Prof. Woodrow's personal library, includes more than 7,600 titles. These titles consist of thousands of books, numerous periodicals and hundreds of documents, mainly in the fields of history, culture and civilization of Latin America. The strength of the collection lies in its focus on Colonial Spanish America and the history and culture of Mexico. 

Prof. Woodrow Wilson Borah (1912-1999)

Prof. Borah studied Latin American history at the University of California, Berkeley. He became a leading scholar in the field of Colonial Latin America, and was known for his innovative research on the historical demography of Colonial Mexico.

His close association, for a period of about twenty years, with his colleague, Berkeley physiologist Sherburne B. Cook, yielded an ambitious reconstruction of the demographic history of Central Mexico of the pre- and post-conquest era.

The lack of any authentic/original documentation indicating population size in the pre-Spanish conquest period (1520) in Central America motivated Prof. Borah and his colleagues to create reliable criteria, based on food production records and other data. According to their estimations the native population of Latin America decreased from about ten million at the beginning of the 16^th century to two million people by the mid-17^th century.