Today’s students are commonly taught the early history of America’s colonization, along with the dark, disturbing details of how the transport and enslavement of millions of Africans built the nation into the superpower it is today.

But there’s an untold narrative of the nation’s early beginnings specifically pertaining to the fact that Blacks in the Americas during European colonization of the Americas actually arrived in La Española, today known as the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Now, a team of leaders from the Dominican Studies Institute at the City University of New York is working to shed light on this particular part of history that has remained largely ignored.

In early December, the Dominican Studies Institute launched the first bilingual educational website dedicated to the dissemination of the history of the first Black African occupants of La Española titled “First Blacks in the Americas,” or “Los primeros negros en las Américas.” The academic website features over 380 pages of manuscripts covering the years from 1497 to 1613, along with 79 pages of transcriptions (both in English and Spanish), 291 bibliographic entries and 131 glossary definitions. Read more here.