Letters in Electronic Enlightenment
With over 56,000 letters as of January 2010, EE is the most wide-ranging online collection of correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid 19th century.
d'Alembert to Voltaire, 24 June 1776
The topics, or subject areas, of the letters cover the whole spectrum of human experience; many letters are private documents in which their writers express their joys and sorrows, triumphs and despairs, loves and hates in ways that would never be seen in formal publications of the period, giving a revealing glimpse into the minds of the times.
The current date range over three centuries is set to expand in the future, as more letters, both earlier and later, are added to EE. The same is true of the locations, or geographical spread, of the letters, already covering four continents, and the languages included.
Rather than being a simple "electronic bookshelf" of separate texts, EE is a network, interlinking letters in a way not previously possible and bringing together a uniquely connected collection of primary documents from the making of the modern world.