A meeting was held on April 25, 1935, in a conference room of the Social Science Research Council, New York City, where the participants decided now was the time to begin publication of "an annual selected and critical bibliography of Latin American research" (Hanke, 1980). Represented at the meeting were nine major universities, the Library of Congress, the American Geographical Society and the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, political science, history, and literature. In 1936, Volume 1 of the Handbook of Latin American Studies was issued. Over the years, some of the foremost scholars of Latin America from the USA have been contributing editors to each volume of the publication. The Handbook has become the accepted reference for earnest students of Latin America and is credited as the world's finest area bibliography (Carter, 1979).
The Handbook has been issued annually since 1936 and has grown in size and complexity. Yet its purpose has not wavered. Miron Burgin, the Handbook's second editor, in the Introduction to Volume 8 (1943) stated that this purpose was "to record, with descriptive and critical notes on significant items, the more important publications of the year covered by the volume" (p. xv). Burgin also emphasized in the Introduction that the Handbook is selective, is not a comprehensive list of publications by discipline (p. xv). The Handbook staff has always used rigorous criteria in selecting publications to be abstracted.
Editorship of the Handbook has been housed in two locations: Harvard University was its original home; it moved to the Library of Congress in 1940. Three university presses have published it: Nos. 1 to 13 - Harvard University Press, Nos. 14 to 40 — University of Florida Press, and Nos. 41 to 43 — University of Texas Press.