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CORVALLIS - When English settlers arrived on the North American mainland in the early 1600s, their interactions with indigenous people became the stuff of legends. Less known is the interaction more than 30 years earlier, when English explorer Martin Frobisher encountered the Inuit people while looking for the Northwest Passage.

Those encounters during three voyages in the mid-1570s are the focus of a lecture at Oregon State University on Thursday, May 6, by University of Southern California professor Peter Mancall. His talk, "Encounters on Ice: Natives and Newcomers in the North Atlantic in the 16th Century," begins at 4 p.m. in Memorial Union Room 206. It is free and open to the public.

While searching for the elusive Northwest Passage to east Asia, Frobisher sailed through ice-choked regions of the far north, encountering the Inuit people. In his talk, Mancall will describe those interactions that "demonstrate that tensions between different peoples in North America predated" English settlement, he said.

Mancall's work centers on early American history and Native American history. He is the first director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, and author or co-author of three books, including "At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America," written in 2003.

His work has been featured on National Public Radio and reviewed in journals throughout the world.

Mancall's appearance is part of OSU's American Culture and Politics series, sponsored by the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities and the OSU history department.