About - About This Site

Web de Anza was designed to provide teachers, students, and scholars with primary source materials concerning Juan Bautista de Anza and his two historic 18th century expeditions from northern Sonora to northern California, leading to the colonization of San Francisco. Web de Anza was designed and developed by faculty and staff at the University of Oregon's Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE) with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, under the direction of Dr. Lynne Anderson. In 2021 Web de Anza will be transferred to the Borderlands Institute at San Diego State University -Imperial Valley and will be under the direction of Dr. Carlos Herrera.

Contents

This site contains primary source diaries and letters in both English and Spanish written by Juan Bautista de Anza and the Franciscan friars who accompanied him on his two 18th century expeditions from New Spain to northern California. Anza's Exploratory Expedition was conducted in 1774 for the purpose of establishing an overland route from northern Sonora (now southern Arizona) to the San Gabriel mission in what is now Los Angeles. Anza Colonizing Expedition was conducted in 1775-1776 for the purpose of bringing 240 men, women, and children to northern California, establishing a mission and presidio near what is now San Francisco. The website also offers a wide array of secondary resources such as maps, chronologies, images, and articles linked strategically to the diaries to facilitate historical research.

Purpose and Design

The Web de Anza was designed to encourage independent exploration and sustained examination of the information contained in the website. Web pages with daily diary entries from the expeditions are created "on the fly" at the user's request and can be configured to meet user needs. Users can move back and forth between the diaries and letters or proceed through the linked web of information in a variety of ways. Most diaries are available in both English and Spanish, with daily links between the two - making it easy to read both the original Spanish and an English translation for any diary entry. Each diary is also linked to a calendar of the expedition, with each date linked to that day's diary entry - thus facilitating navigation to and within the document. For most of the diaries, there is also a "Story Highlights" page, with each story highlight linked to the corresponding diary entry. Listed below are the main sections in Web de Anza.

Main Sections

The core of Web de Anza is the Archives. In it you will find Spanish transcriptions of the original manuscripts and English translations of the diaries kept by Anza for each expedition, as well as the those of the Franciscan friars and officers who accompanied him. Letters relevant to the two Anza expeditions can also be found in the Archives.

Supporting the site is an Overviews section, which offers general information about Anza's two expeditions, including brief descriptions of the characters in a Who's Who, a synopsis of Anza's 1775-76 Diary, and a chronology of the events of his journey.

Important for studying and understanding the two Anza expeditions are the many types of Reference Materials contained in the site. These include an Image Gallery, an Atlas of Maps, a short Biography of Anza, Collateral Materials written by scholars and research assistants, and a Bibliography of the materials consulted and used in creating Web de Anza.

Web de Anza's Search feature allows users to conduct a keyword search of Juan Bautista de Anza's English diary of the 1775-1776 Colonizing Expedition. It also allows users to conduct a keyword search across all English versions of the diaries for both of Anza expeditions, those written for the Exploratory Expedition of 1774 and those written for the Colonizing Expedition of 1775-1776.

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