Vistas is an interactive CD/DVD and website that offers a critical selection of primary sources, high-resolution color images, and interpretive essays of these documents and pictures. In essence, it brings the best of the archive, the museum, and the lecture hall into the hands and onto the screens of researchers, college teachers and students. The resources on Vistas are divided into six thematic units:

• Making Sense of the Pre-Columbian
• Reckoning with Mestizaje
• The Political Force of Images
• Patterns of the Everyday
• The Mechanics of an Art World
• Otherworldly Visions

In each unit, users can engage the ideas expressed in the visual language of images and objects and in the written language of the colonial-era documents. These documents can be read in their original language (be it Spanish, French, Nahuatl, Quiché Maya, Aymara, or Quechua) and in English translation.

The Vistas CD/DVD will be ready for classroom use by the fall of 2003. The web version of Vistas, containing primary documents, translations, bibliographies, glossaries and timelines, will continue to expand across 2002 and into 2003.

Vistas is funded by a grant from the National Endowment from the Humanities, the Argosy Foundation, and by Smith College and Fordham University. If you are interested in testing Vistas in your college classroom, reviewing a Vistas pilot, keeping informed about Vistas, or in supporting the development of Vistas, please contact the co-directors.