First-Hand Accounts and Letters

Letters and first-hand accounts allow us to see seventeenth-century society as no other record can. These rare eyewitness writings place us in the position of a“looking in” on a dead past and seeing it come to life through the perspectives of those who recorded their experiences. We should not take these narratives at face value, but they are no lessvaluable, in fact can be even more revealing, when they reflect Eurocentric viewsor limitations of past knowledge and understanding. They are best approached with the questions: what are the authorstrying to tell us and what are their agendas? These materials do give us a sense of the contingencies, uncertainties,and dilemmas that surrounded choices and when read critically should lead to abetter understanding of what factors shaped individual decisions. A full-text searchable database (XML) givesus a powerful tool for tracing and comparing topics, ideas, concepts,motivations, and much more from vantage points of time, space, power,authority, race, class, gender, and ethnicity.