Documents of the Spanish Florida Borderlands: A Calendaring Project at the University of Florida

Abstract

A major resource for early American history-Spanish Florida borderlands documentation for the period I 5I8-I82 i-has become generally accessible to scholars through a finding guide and calendaring project at the P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Begun in I974 and supported since I977 by two research grants (for a total of $2I9,532) from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project team is completing a detailed index to primary source material about Florida and the Southeast during the colonial period that is contained in over i,ooo,ooo frames of microfilm and I50,000 photostats. The staff of three full-time archivists, Bruce S. Chappell, Paul Weaver, and Marta Domingo, is under the direction of P. K. Yonge Library chairperson, Elizabeth Alexander. Dr. Nettie Lee Benson, of the University of Texas, Austin, serves as project consultant. The present writer is principal investigator. The primary source material in copy form at the University of Florida constitutes this country's largest collection of Spanish borderlands documents for the Southeast, as well as the last substantial collection of unorganized materials treating of Spanish colonial activity in North America.1 Many documents, such as the 65,000 originating from Florida's