This collection contains materials created and compiled by Joseph J. Williams, SJ and reflects his academic interests in the Caribbean and Africa.

The bulk of the collection consists of the Anansi stories, approximately four thousand handwritten tales about a folk character which originated in Africa and became part of Jamaican traditions. The stories were written by Jamaican school children in 1930 in response to a contest Williams ran, and are accompanied by transcriptions.

The collection also contains manuscripts of anthropological works by Williams and others working in Africa and the Carribbean. Williams collected additional materials documenting these regions which span the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. They include: broadsides; correspondence; engravings; financial, legal, and shipping documents; newspapers; and reports. Their topics comprise the history, culture, and religious practices of the Caribbean (particularly Jamaica) and Africa; abolition and the slave trade; piracy; colonialism; and the Jesuit order. Some highlights of the collection are an eighteenth-century indenture (a legal contract, in this case for the lease of an estate); a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wills; a letter written by Sir William Penn (an English navy admiral and the father of William Penn, the founder of the state of Pennsylvania); and a unique handmade scrapbook entitled “Souvenir of the Isle of Springs."