Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters

Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters is a collection of digitized primary sources documenting European migration to and colonization of Africa, Australasia, and North America. It also documents the everyday life of settlers in these locations. Though the collection primarily consists of materials produced by British colonists and American settlers, it also includes some materials produced by the Indigenous peoples they displaced. Geographic regions in this collection include:

• North America: Migration and frontier life in the American East, American Midwest, American Southwest, California & Mexico, and Canada
• Africa: British colonial expansion in South Africa, exploration of West Africa, and the colonial administration of Lagos
• Australia & New Zealand: British colonization, including the establishment of the penal colony of Sydney
• Central America: British colonization of British Honduras (Belize)

Material types include correspondence, diaries, government papers, business records, land transactions, legal documents, speeches, books, and pamphlets. The original documents were sourced from American and British libraries and archives.