The Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library is an accumulation of research notes and transcriptions of historical documents from archives throughout Europe and Latin America, made between approximately 1930-2001 by Engel Sluiter, former Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, who was of Dutch origin. The collection consists of 98 boxes of these notes and transcriptions, estimated in excess of 160,000 pages, including photocopies of documents and other written works. While the collection is summarized as relating to “17th-century Dutch-Iberian global rivalry,” subjects range from Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese voyages to the Americas, imperial finances between the later sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, Dutch voyages during the early 17th century, shipping records, the Dutch presence in North America, the Caribbean and Brazil, the transatlantic slave trade, the Newfoundland fisheries, and the Dutch Arctic exploration and whaling.
With the support of the New Netherland Institute and a Digital Humanities Collaborative Research grant provided by the Mellon Foundation, the Dutch Studies Program made a persistent identifier to the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection. Click on the buttons below for more information, and read this interview with the project’s principal researcher Julie van den Hout.