Frontier Life

This digital collection of primary source documents helps us to understand existence on the edges of the anglophone world from 1650-1920. Discover the various European and colonial frontier regions of North America, Africa and Australasia through documents that reveal the lives of settlers and indigenous peoples in these areas.

In September 2017, this resource became open for all educational institutions in Canada. CRKN registered institutions automatically have full access to Frontier Life, please click here to visit the resource. For all other Canadian public, post-secondary, special, archives, museums, and K-12 libraries, please click here for access details. 

Institutions across Canada can now benefit from full access to Frontier Life: Borderlands Settlement and Colonial Encounters, a digital collection of primary sources offering a glimpse into Canada’s unique historic past.

Consortia Canada, Adam Matthew and 18 leading academic institutions have collaborated to open this essential content to libraries and educational institutions nationwide, including all library types: public, post-secondary, special, archives, museums and K-12 schools. The collaboration unlocks important primary sources to provide the broader community with a comparative view on the various colonial frontiers across the globe.