Click Here to Connect to Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment

Early Encounters in North America contains 1,482 authors and over 100,000 pages of  letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters.  Particular care has been taken to index the material so that it can be used in new ways.  For example, you can identify all encounters between the French and the Huron between 1650 and 1700.

To begin with we needed to define an “encounter” and its key elements. An encounter took place between peoples, at a particular place, at a particular time. We came up with a definition and built a special database from the original materials. This table would, for the first time, allow users to see a chronological table of the major encounters, with one-click access to the primary materials that describe them.

The encounters database was also built to include fielded data indicating the “where, when, who, and what” of each encounter. The user could then consult the encounter database and jump directly to the relevant materials. It made it possible for users to answer perplexing questions with ease – for example, “How do the encounters between the Spanish and the Indians compare with those of the French and the Indians?”

(from the website)

This is an Alexander Street database, unique because they provide full text and primary documents. You can browse or search for people, events, encounters, authors, audio/video, places, and years. Link to the full text or image.