The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA was published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) under the general editorship of Professor Ralph Bauer, at the University of Maryland at College Park. Intended as a long-term and inter-disciplinary project committed to exploring the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies, it invited scholars from all disciplines to submit their editions of early American texts for publication on this site.
In the EADA Database, you can find texts that are housed at EADA itself and that have been encoded using TEI, which makes it possible for you to search for specific terms, such as author, title, and subject, within and across the texts. EADA vouches for the accuracy of the header information as well as for the authenticity and quality of the texts contained in its database, which is continually and gradually expanding. If you do not find the early American text you are looking for in the EADA database, you may also consult the “Gateway to Early American Authors on the WEB,” which allows you to browse a list of early American authors whose texts are available both on sites that others have posted on the World Wide Web as well as texts from this site, the Early Americas Digital Archive. Texts external to the EADA Database cannot be searched with the EADA Search Engine; nor can EADA vouch for the authenticity or quality of any of the texts external to its database and referred to in the Gateway.