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Appendix II: Working with Primary Sources Supplement to Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, Princeton University Press, 2006 Last revised: April 2009 In this appendix I want to talk about some of the most important collections of source material, especially material that I didn’t discuss in Chapter Five, and I want to show you how to go about identifying other sources related to your topic. The discussion here will broken down into a number of parts. First, I’ll talk about the published documents, and then I’ll discuss collections that are available in some semi-published form: on microfilm or microfiche, on CD-ROM or through the internet. After that, I’ll give some information about archival sources, and then I’ll talk about various open sources—sources that were never secret and are available today in a variety of formats. Then I’ll tell you what you need to know about using the Freedom of Information Act, putting in Mandatory Declassification Review requests, and in general about what you need to do if you’d like to see still-classified material. Finally, I’ll deal with some practical matters: funding, housing when you’re doing archival work abroad, and so on. This appendix comes in three versions: the version published in the book and two online versions, this version, designed for most users, and a UCLA version (with UCLA library information and some links that work only from UCLA computers). This website will be updated about once a year. Contents of this page: I. Published collections of documents II. Microfilm, Microfiche, and CD-ROM sources US National Archives; National Archives publications of German documents Digital National Security Archive; National Security Archive Cold War International History Project Defense Department FOIA release list Manuscript sources (both U.S. and non-U.S.) Doing research at the U.S. National Archives VI. Getting to see classified material (and other misc. matters) VII. Some Practical Information (copying documents, housing, funding) I. Published DocumentsThe collections of diplomatic documents published by major governments are of fundamental importance, and for that reason were discussed at some length in the final section of Chapter Five. Rather than rehash that discussion, let me just give some of the key references here: Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS] Basic FRUS website (with best list of recently published volumes) Volumes available online (1945 – present) Volume available online (1861-1960) Volumes available for purchase.
You’re probably better off phoning in your order to the GPO (866- 512-1800)
than using the online form. Status reports
(publication schedule) British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914 (11 volumes) Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939 (65 volumes) Documents on British Policy Overseas (for post-1945 period; 15 volumes so far). To see what is currently available for purchase, go into the British Stationery Office Online Bookshop and then type "Documents on British Policy Overseas" in the search box and click go British Documents on Foreign Affairs (Confidential print, privately published, covering roughly the period from 1850-1956, over 500 volumes published so far). A list is available online. Documents diplomatiques français (various series, covering from 1871 through the 1960s). List by series. Full list of German diplomatic documents (from German Foreign Office archives website) Die grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871-1914 (40 volumes in 54) French translation: La Politique extérieure de l’Allemagne, 1870-1914 (32 volumes). Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, 1918-1945 (62 volumes in 5 series). Two of those series also published in English translation: Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945 (18 volumes, covering the period from 1933 to 1941). Akten zur auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (covers the period from 1949 on, with at least a single volume for each year; over 30 volumes published so far, dealing with the 1949-53 and 1963-74 periods). Die Internationalen Beziehungen im Zeitalter des Imperialismus: Dokumente aus den Archiven der Zarischen und der Provisorischen Regierung (pre-revolutionary Russian documents published during the Soviet period) Krasnyĭ arkhiv (106 vols) Note also Peter Blitstein’s “Selected Bibliography of Recent Published Document Collections on Soviet History” This includes a section on late imperial Russia. You should remember, of course, that other governments—Australia, Italy, and Belgium to name just a few of the western ones—also publish collections of documents. And there are many published collections of documents that are not put out by governments at all. Some deal with particular topics. Some are collections—often multi-volume collections—of a particular individual’s papers. These can generally be found using the techniques outlined in Chapter Five, especially the technique of using the word “sources” as one of your subject words when you do a subject search in a library catalogue, and the technique of putting words like “papers” and “correspondence” in the title field at the same time as you search for a particular subject. Important collections are also cited in the bibliographies of the books and dissertations you look at, and are sometimes also cited in the major collections of diplomatic documents that I just listed. They can in addition be found in bibliographies like the Bibliographie für Zeitgeschichte, interspersed with listings of books and articles dealing with the same general subject. II. Microfilm, Microfiche, and CD-ROM MaterialIt’s amazing how much material you can examine without having to spend a single night away from home. A vast amount of material is available on microfilm, microfiche, and CD-ROM, and in recent years a very large and growing body of material has been put online. Let me talk first about those first three types of sources. You can usually get access to them even if your home library doesn’t own them. To order them through inter-library loan, first request the finding aids—they’re generally published as supplements to the original microform or CD-ROM publications—and then request specific reels or fiche or CD’s. You can locate those guides and collections and make your inter-library loan request by WorldCat (which has now absorbed Eureka, the old union catalogue for the Research Libraries Group, which was also sometimes called RLIN). WorldCat is best accessed through your regular university library’s online catalogue, but it also has an open search engine. How do you identify material of this sort you might be interested in? The basic library search engines are not very good for this purpose. Some, although by no means all, of them allow you to limit your search, for example, to microform material. But you just can’t count on such a search to turn up the material of this sort included in that particular database. Harvard’s HOLLIS catalogue, for instance, allows you to select “microforms” in the drop-down menu for “Format” on the lower-left of the “expanded search” page, but if you did a search for “Joint Chiefs of Staff” and you selected “microforms” in that way, you’d get some listings, but not including the Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff microfilm collection, which the Harvard library not only owns but which lists elsewhere in HOLLIS. Other “microform” searches yield better results, but the point here is that this type of search is simply not reliable—and HOLLIS is actually better than most university library search engines. You might have more luck with the Library of Congress catalogue. You can just do an ordinary keyword search, but use the search term "microform" in conjunction with other search terms (for example: “Japan AND foreign AND microform”—but without the quotation marks). But if your keyword is a phrase, make sure you enclose it in quotation marks or the search won’t work. Once you do find something, you can click the tab for “subjects/content” and then click into the links for the subject headings you’ll find there. So you can find things with this
method, but there is no getting around the fact that it’s still a little
hit-or-miss. How well you do really depends
on your ability to guess the right keywords.
So is there another way of proceeding? Well, you could begin by going through the
two online guides I referred to in Chapter Five: Frank Conaway’s “Guide to Microform
and CD-Rom Sources for History and Political Science in the University of
Chicago Library” and the list of “Major Microform
Collections in the Combined Arms Research Library.” Those two guides will give you a general
sense for what is available in this area.
You might also want to take a look at the Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress. The online version of that guide builds on a number of earlier published versions, most recently one edited by Patrick Frazier: Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress, ed. Patrick Frazier (Washington: Library of Congress, 1996). To use the online guide, first click into one of the halves of the index—either the A-J or the K-Z half—and either scroll through to see what is available, look up the name of a particular country or subject you are interested in, or do a Ctrl F search for a country’s name or other keyword. Particular collections are listed under various subject headings in that alphabetical index. Once you have identified a particular collection, click into the letter that the title of that collection begins with. (The links for each letter are at the top of the index pages.) For example, if you scroll down to “Japan” toward the bottom of the A-J part of the index, you will see two headings, “Japan—Foreign Relations” and “Japan—History.” Say you are interested in the first collection listed under “Japan—Foreign Relations,” namely “Archives in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” So you click into the “A” list. The collections are listed there in alphabetical order by title. Of course you’ll also come across references to particular collections of this sort as you do your regular bibliographical work. But you may want to do a more systematic search for what is available, so let me talk a bit about how that can be done. You can search systematically because microfilm, microfiche and
CD-ROM collections are published by just a handful of major private firms and
governments—and by “governments” I mean mainly the U.S. government, which, in
fact, has made available not just its own records, but massive amounts of
material produced by certain other countries.
So you just go through the catalogues describing these products one by
one. University Publications of America (now part of
LexisNexis) is the first firm you should know about. For a list of UPA’s microfilm collections
in International Studies, click here. You’ll see a list of about twelve
subheadings—International
Relations, European
Studies, and so on. By clicking into the links for those subheadings,
you’ll then see the particular collections in that area that they’ve
published. When you find one that you
think you might want to see, just bookmark that link, maybe keeping those
bookmarks together in a single folder. Note that for some collections very
detailed user guides (listing by frame number every document in each reel)
are now available online on this website.
There’s in fact a linked list of user
guides on the site. Using those
guides, you’ll be able to order specific reels through Interlibrary Loan if
your own library doesn’t own the collection.
(You might also want to click into “American
studies” and not just “international studies.” In the American studies list, click into
the link for “political history.” A
whole series of interesting collections is included here.) Some of the UPA collections are of really fundamental
importance. I personally find the
collections of JCS and NSC material to be particularly useful. The first two parts of the Records
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff cover the period from 1942 to 1953; this
includes about 120 reels of microfilm.
UPA has also begun to put out a third part, covering the period from
1954 to 1960; the section that has just come out deals with the Far East. Some of the user guides from the World War
II period have been posted online; click here. If you work with the JCS material, you might want to use it in
conjunction with the various histories that the JCS Historical Office (now
officially called the “Office of Joint History, Office of the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff”) has produced.
The series that office published on The Joint Chiefs of Staff and
National Policy (UA23.7 .H56 1986) is particularly important. Seven volumes in that
series, covering the period from 1945 to 1960, have come out so far. But there are other JCS histories worth
knowing about. Some have been
published—to see what they are, just do a title search in a good library
catalogue for “History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff”—and others have been
declassified and are available in the archives or online. The JCS “History of the
Indochina Incident,” for example (available on the DoD’s FOIA website), I
found to be of particular value: it
summarized documents that were considered too sensitive to declassify and
include in the regular boxes of JCS papers that were made available to the
public. Such histories are
particularly useful if you’re doing archival work, because their footnotes
tell you what the richest files are. Five
volumes from the “Joint Chiefs of
Staff and the War in Vietnam” series, covering the period from 1954 through
1973, are also available on the DoD FOIA website; check the subject page for Vietnam
in the DOD’s FOIA Reading Room (which I’ll be talking about a bit later in
the section on online sources). Various
other JCS histories exist but have not been declassified, and there are
classified versions of some of the JCS histories that have been
published. (For a partial list, click here.)
If you find out about something of interest, you can of course ask to see it
under the Freedom of Information Act, which I’ll be talking about at the end
of this appendix. The NSC material is composed of two collections: the Documents of the National Security Council and the Minutes of Meetings of the National Security Council. Each of these includes the original publication plus a number of supplements. These two collections should be used in conjunction with each other. How do you use the NSC material? The microfilm collections come with guides. You can either use those guides, or better yet, you could use a very good 721-page cumulative index to both collections: the Index to Documents of the National Security Council. This covers the material through the first supplement of the Minutes of Meetings and the fourth supplement of the Documents. This is quite a chunk: some of this material was produced during the Reagan period. Most of the guides, moreover, have been pdf’d and posted on the UPA website. For a list (with links to the guides), click here. If you’re working with the NSC material, there are a few other lists you should know about. There is a list of the numbered NSC documents through the end of the Eisenhower period in Gerald Haines, A Reference Guide to United States Department of State Special Files, pp. 38-62. I'm also posting a somewhat shorter list of numbered NSC documents, arranged by subject, also limited to documents from the Eisenhower period. For pdf lists of the various categories of NSC documents (including NSAMs, NSDMs, and PDs; some with links to full-text versions), go to the University of Michigan Document Center's list of Federal Government Resources: President of the United States and click into “directives.” For the NSC meetings, I found a list of the NSC summaries of discussion for the Eisenhower period which I’m making available here as a link. Here are some other interesting UPA collections: Eisenhower
National Security Files (with online guides) John F. Kennedy National Security Files,
1961-1963: The Lyndon
B. Johnson National Security Files, 1963-1969 (with guides) Memos of the Special Assistant for National
Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy to President Johnson, 1963-1966 Vietnam: National Security Council Histories (SRLF) Papers of the Nixon White House Part 1.
Official Inventories of Papers and Other Historical Materials Nixon National Security Files (SALT) (Meetings with foreign leaders) Africa Thomson-Gale is the second firm you should know about. (The old Scholarly Resources microform publications are now handled by this company.) When you click into their website, click the link for “browse our catalog” at the left. You can then browse by subject (e.g., “history”) or by major collections (e.g., “Russian collections”). Or you could search for a particular keyword (e.g., “Japan”). Many of the collections here are based on the holdings of the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office, although quite a few other interesting collections are included here—for example, the Dean Acheson Papers, the George Ball Papers, the Walter Lippmann Papers, a collection of Chamberlain Papers, a collection of “Papers of the Prime Ministers of Great Britain,” and a couple of collections of Churchill Papers (The Sir Winston Churchill Papers; Churchill at War). Various detailed guides are available online at this site. Thomson-Gale has also come out with a whole series of collections drawn from Russian and Soviet archives. This “Russian Archives” collection (actually 19 separate collections of Russian archival material going back to the period of the Napoleonic Wars) includes a major collection relating to the Soviet period: “The Departmental Records of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1953-1966.” Incidentally, there is another important
collection of Soviet archival material available on microfilm: the Archives of the
Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State,
an enormous collection that can be consulted at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University and at the Lamont Library at Harvard.
Next let me talk a bit about Adam Matthew Publications. This is a British firm and mainly puts out collections of British material. When you go into their website, click into “Collections A-Z,” and then “U.S. Dollar version.” A long list of publications, not divided up by category, then appears on the screen. Here’s a list of some items that might be of interest to people in our field: Cabinet Papers (actually both Cabinet and Prime Minister’s Office papers) Curzon, India and Empire The First World War: A Documentary Record Foreign Office Files (broken down into collections dealing with China, Cuba, Japan, Post-War Europe, the USSR, and the United States) Macmillan Cabinet Papers (available online as noted below, but was originally sold on CD-ROM, and that CD-ROM version is still available in certain libraries) Nuclear Policy and the Cold War Treasury Papers (of John Maynard Keynes) A number of important collections dealing with international relations are available online through subscribing libraries from Adam Matthew Digital: Foreign Office Files for China, 1949-1976 The Nixon Years, 1969-1974 (key collections from the British National Archives at Kew) Macmillan Cabinet Papers, 1957-1963 Those are the most
important private publishers of this kind of material, but before I go on to
to tell you about what the U.S. government puts out, let me just note the
existence of a couple of other important sources of the sort. First, there’s a very important source
called the Declassified Documents Reference System. As its name suggests, the people who run it
put out a selection of important declassified documents. For years, those documents were made
available on microfiche, with hard-copy guides published periodically, and
that material is still available in many libraries. But the microfiche
version was replaced by an online version, and so I’ll discuss this source in
the section of the appendix dealing with online materials. The same basic point applies to a second source of this sort. The National Security Archive, a private
organization based in Washington, D.C., puts out a series of collections of
documents on microfiche dealing with various topics related to national
security and foreign policy. The documents assembled come from a variety of
different sources, gathered by very skilled “archive hounds” and vigorous
“FOIA-requesters.” Those microfiche collections are still quite useful, but
today you can also consult these collections online. That online series, available through
subscribing libraries, is called the “Digital
National Security Archive,” and I’ll be talking about the DNSA in the
section on online materials. Let me conclude this section by talking briefly about microform
materials put out under official auspices.
This means mainly the microfilm collections published by the U.S.
National Archives. There are other
microform sources that could be mentioned in this context. The major collections of diplomatic
documents, for example, sometimes have microfiche supplements. The FRUS microfiche supplements, for
example, are listed in the FRUS website, cited above. (To locate
them, do a Ctrl F search for “microfiche.”)
Microfiche supplements have also been published in conjunction with
the Documents on British Policy Overseas. But the U.S. National
Archives is by far the most important official producer of this sort of
material. The National Archives periodically publishes a catalogue of their microfilm publications: National Archives Microfilm Publications for Research: A Comprehensive Catalog (Washington: NARA, 2000). There is also an online version of the National Archives microfilm catalogue. If you use the online version, you can search by keyword or by record group. (NARA’s holdings are divided up into over 500 record groups.) As it turns out, only a small number of record groups are of interest for our purposes—I’ll be telling you what they are in the section about archives—and there are microfilm publications listed for only a handful of them. And of those, only two are of really fundamental importance: RG 59: General Records of the Department of State (1100 publications) RG 242: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized (93 publications) There are, however, a number of interesting microfilm publications based on material found in various other record groups: RG 225: Records of Joint Army and Navy Boards and Committees RG 226: Records of the Office of Strategic Services RG 243: Records of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey RG 260:
Records of U.S. Occupation Headquarters, World War II RG
331: Records of Allied Operational and
Occupation Headquarters, World War II
(Records relating to the International Military Tribunal for the Far
East) Using the online catalogue,
you can quickly see which microfilm publications have been drawn from
material in those last five record groups.
As for the State Department material in RG 59, if you don’t want to
review the entire list of microfilm publications—and there are about 1100 of
them—you could use the online catalogue, but conduct a more targeted
search. You could, for example, put
the name of the country you’re interested in in the keyword field, put
“RG059” in the record group field, and then click “Display Search Results.” A hard copy catalogue of microfilm
publications relating to foreign policy was published a number of years
ago: United States,
National Archives and Records Administration, Diplomatic
Records: A Select Catalog of National Archives Microfilm Publications
(Washington: NARA, 1986) Let me end this section with a word about RG 242. This is the record group for foreign material that fell into the hands of the American government. Some of the sources here are very rich. There are 93 microfilm publications listed for this record group, and some of the most important ones have to do with Germany. Probably the most valuable of those is microfilm publication T120, Records of the German Foreign Office Received by the Department of State, which contains over 5800 reels. There are two guides that can be used in conjunction with this collection: American Historical Association, Committee for the Study of War Documents, A Catalogue of Files and Microfilms of the German Foreign Ministry Archives, 1867-1920 (Washington, 1959) (also available as microfilm publication T322) A Catalog of Files and Microfilms of the German Foreign Ministry Archives, 1920-1945, 4 vols., comp. and ed. George O. Kent (Stanford, Calif., Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1962-1972 ). The first of those catalogues, according to its preface, “is both a record of the files of the Political Department of the German Foreign Ministry for the period 1867-1920 and a guide to all microfilming programs which have been carried out in these and other related files by the German War Document Program of the American, British, and French Governments, by other governments, and by certain institutions and individuals.” There are many other collections of German material from RG 242 that have been put out on microfilm. There is, for example, a whole series of publications of the papers of well-known German military figures—Roon, Schlieffen, Gneisenau, Seeckt, Groener, Moltke, and so on. Microfilm Publication T291 contains the papers of certain German diplomats. For more information about some of these materials, see J.S. Conway, German Historical Source Material in United States Universities (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Council for European Studies, 1973); Anne Hope and Jörg Nagler, Guide to German Sources in American Archives and Libraries (Washington: German Historical Institute, 1991—available free of charge from the GHI); and Manfred F. Boemeke and Roger Chickering, Guide to Archives and Historical Collections in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Part II: Research Resources in Modern German and Austrian History (Washington: GHI, 1995). There are also some
Italian collections listed, including collections of Mussolini and Ciano
papers. There’s a collection of Soviet
documents from the Smolensk archive—that material was the basis for Merle
Fainsod’s famous book, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1958)—and even a collection of Grenada material. For
more information about these collections, check out the section on RG 242 in the National Archives' online guide. Many important British materials are also available on microfilm. You can find a lot of them by doing an advanced search on the MELVYL catalogue. Be sure to click the link at the top for “advanced” search. In one of the search windows, select “subject” from the drop-down menu and type in something like “Great Britain Foreign relations Sources.” Make sure the “no” box is checked under “words as phrase.” If you clicked “search” at this point, the search engine would list everything in the database listed under a set of subject headings which taken together contain all those words. But that would yield a lot of non-microfilm material. To then limit that search to microfilm sources, in a second search window select “keyword” from the drop-down menu and type in the word “microfilm.” Now run the search. You’ll turn up up quite a few listings, many of which may have also turned up in your search of the various publishers’ websites I listed above. You can target the search more narrowly by adding other keywords, like the name of another particular country—“Japan,” for example. But the technique of using
“microfilm” (or even “microform”) as a keyword does not always work. It would not, for example,
turn up many of the very important microfilm collections of British cabinet
documents that you can find just by doing an author search for “Great
Britain. Cabinet Office” and following some of the links that turn up. Here’s a list of the most important of
those holdings that I found in MELVYL.
They’re listed in order by class number, classes being the basic units
into which departmental collections are divided in the British National
Archives. The class numbers themselves
are noted in brackets, as is their current location. The listings marked with an asterisk are
covered by finding aids published by the List and Index Society, which I’ll
talk about in more detail later in the section on archival research. Committee of Imperial Defence and
Standing Defence Sub-committee [CAB 2]: Minutes,
1902-1939. *Cabinet Minutes and Memoranda,
1916-1939
[CAB 23 and 24]. Note that a Subject
Index of War Cabinet Minutes is
also available on microfilm. It’s divided up as follows: [1] 1916 Dec.-1918 Mar.; [2] 1918 Apr.-1919
Dec.; [3] 1939 Sept.-1941; Dec.[4] 1942 Jan.-1945 July. CAB 23 is covered by List and
Index Society vols. 40, 51, 61, 62, 92, 100. CAB 24 is covered by List and
Index Society vols. 29, 41, 52, 156 Imperial War Cabinet,
1917; minutes of meetings 1-14, Mar. 20-May 2, 1917 (with subject
index) [CAB 23/40] Papers and Minutes of the British
Secretariat to the Supreme War Council, 1917-1919.
[CAB 25] Proceedings and
Conclusions of Anglo-French and Allied conferences, 1915-1920 [CAB
28] Cabinet
papers, 1880-1916. [CAB 37/1-162]
Records of the Committee of
Imperial Defence, 1888-1914 [CAB 38] Cabinet letters in Royal Archives,
1868-1916. [CAB
41/1-37] Chiefs of Staff Committee, Minutes of meetings and papers,
1934-1939
[CAB 53/1-55] *Cabinet
Minutes, 1939-1945 [CAB 65/1-55] See
List and Index Society vols. 71 and 74 *War Cabinet Minutes
and Papers, 1939-1941 [CAB 67]. See
List and Index Society vol. 148 *War Cabinet minutes and
papers, 1939-1942. Memoranda (WP(G) Series) [CAB 68]. See
List and Index Society vol. 148 Chiefs of Staff Committee. Minutes, 1939-1946 [CAB 79] Chiefs of Staff Committee, Memoranda and minutes [CAB 80/1-22, 104-105] Committees and Sub-committees
of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Minutes and Papers, 1939-1947. [CAB
81] Note:
CAB 81/40 deals with post-hostilities planning, 1939-1947 Joint Planning Committee of the
Committee of Imperial Defence and the War Cabinet, Minutes of Meetings [CAB
84] Chiefs of Staff Committee, Anglo-French Committees: Minutes
of Meetings, 1939-1940
[CAB 85/1-64] Chiefs
of Staff Committee Papers, 1942-1947 [CAB 88/1-39] Commonwealth
and International Conferences, Minutes and Papers, 1939-1945. [CAB
99] Cabinet Minutes (CM and CC
Series), 1945-1974. [CAB 128] Cabinet Memoranda (CP and C
Series), 1945-1972. [CAB 129] III. Online SourcesIn the past, a vast amount of very valuable material was published on microfilm or microfiche, but the tendency nowadays is make this kind of material available in some electronic format—or, more precisely, to make it available online. In this section, I’d like to talk about some of the main online sources, first those put out by various private organizations and then those put out under the auspices of various government agencies. The Declassified Documents Reference System [DDRS]
is the first such source you should know about, especially if you’re working
on the Cold War period. The people who
run it publish a selection of newly released declassified documents. As I
noted above, these documents used to be published on microfiche. They’re now
available online—but only through libraries that subscribe to this service. With the DDRS search engine, you can do either a basic search or an advanced search. You might as well always use the advanced search option; if the only field you fill in is the top one, this is equivalent to doing a basic search anyway. You begin by entering the terms you want to search for in the search fields at the top of the screen. You can search for words found in the title or abstract of a particular document, or in the text of the document itself. You can also do a “keyword/subject” search: this turns up documents containing the words or phrases you specify in their titles, descriptions, or in their first fifty words. You then use the remaining fields to limit the search in various ways—by date of issue, agency of origin, classification level, and so on. For example, for “Document classification” you can choose “top secret” to get only the documents originally given the highest regular classification—these are presumably the most sensitive, and therefore the most interesting, documents available. By holding down the control key, you can select documents in more than one category—for example, both secret and top secret documents. In theory, this is a very powerful finding aid and can be an effective (and efficient) way to generate source material bearing on particular topics. You can zero in on documents that were produced within a particular time frame, or by a particular agency, or which dealt with a particular subject, or indeed that meet all three criteria. But be careful, because this search engine is by no means perfect. Not all documents dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, are labeled as such, so a subject search for that term would not yield everything in the DDRS database dealing with that episode. Searching by date and perhaps by agency of origin might be a more effective way to generate listings related to that topic. The Digital National Security Archive [DNSA], another subscription service, is the second online source you should know about. The DNSA developed out of the microfiche collections that the National Security Archive published in the 1990s (and continues to publish). The DNSA currently includes about 30 collections, each focused on a particular topic: Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1973–1990The
Berlin Crisis, 1958–1962 China
and the United States: From Hostility to Engagement, 1960–1998 The
Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 The
Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited: An
International Collection of Documents, From the Bay of Pigs to the Brink of
Nuclear War Death
Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the
United States, 1954-1999
El
Salvador: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977–1984 El
Salvador: War, Peace, and Human Rights, 1980–1994 Iran:
The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977–1980 The
Iran-Contra Affair: The Making of a Scandal Iraqgate:
Saddam Hussein, U.S. Policy and the Prelude to the Persian Gulf War,
1980–1994 Japan
and the United States: Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations,
1960–1976 and 1977-1992 The
Kissinger Transcripts: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969–1977 Nicaragua:
The Making of U.S. Policy, 1978–1990 The
Philippines: U.S. Policy during the Marcos Years, 1965–1986 Presidential
Directives on National Security from Harry Truman to William Clinton (Part I)
and From Truman to George W. Bush (Part II) South
Africa: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1962–1989 The
Soviet Estimate: U.S. Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947–1991 Terrorism
and US Policy 1968–2002 U.S.
Espionage and Intelligence, 1947–1996 The
U.S. Intelligence Community, 1947–1989 U.S.
Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction:
From World War II to Iraq U.S.
Military Uses of Space, 1945–1991 U.S.
Nuclear History: Nuclear Arms and Politics in the Missile Age, 1955–1968 U.S.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Policy, 1945–1991 U.S.
Policy in the Vietnam War, Part I: 1954-1968
U.S.
Policy in the Vietnam War, Part II: 1969-1975
These collections are
described in detail on the DNSA webpage. Just click into the link on the left for
“collections,” and then click into the links for whichever collections
interest you. Note that some of these
collections are linked to certain projects conducted under the auspices of
the National Security Archive itself.
The collection on U.S.-Japanese relations, for example, was connected
to the National Security Archive U.S.-Japan project. That project, incidentally, has its own website, which contains the text of various working papers and oral history
transcripts. The CIA’s “family jewels” collection, a set of 67 documents, is also freely available
(i.e., no subscription needed) on the DNSA site. The DNSA search page is very easy to use. To get into the search window, just click the “Search: Documents” link. You can then search by collection or you can search in all collections at the same time. You can limit the search by date, by level or classification, and in various other ways. Keywords corresponding to a particular document are noted in the listing for that document, and those keywords themselves are linked, so you can quickly call up other documents related to the subject you’re interested in. You have the option of viewing (and saving) particular documents on pdf; this, incidentally, is the case for the DDRS as well. The DNSA is, as I say, a subscription service, but there are many documents (including documents not in the DNSA) available on the National Security Archive’s open website. This material is organized into various “electronic briefing books,” dealing with various topics, and containing documents and commentary. Those briefing books are in turn listed by area on the NSA “documents” webpage (“Nuclear History,” “China and East Asia,” “U.S. Intelligence,” “Humanitarian Interventions,” and so on). The Cold War International History Project [CWIHP] website is also worth looking at, at least if you are interested in the Cold War period. The CWIHP’s “Virtual Archive” is composed of a series of collections of documents, often translated from Russian, east European, or Asian Communist original texts. Those collections (“New Evidence on Sino-Soviet Relations,” “Poland in the Cold War,” “Stalin’s Conversations with Chinese Leaders,” and so on) are listed on the Virtual Archive’s webpage. Many of those documents were originally published in the CWIHP’s Bulletin or in one of the CWIHP’s working papers. Both the Bulletin and the working papers are available online. Those are perhaps the most important sources of online material made available by private institutions, but this is by no means a comprehensive listing of what can be found on the internet. If you read Russian, for example, you’ll certainly be interested in the “online document archive” of Russian-language documents on the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies website. And you’ll probably want to take a look at Vladimir Bukovsky’s Soviet Archives website and at the material available on the Parallel History Project website (“thousands of pages of unpublished archival documents in facsimile, articles, and research reports with a particular emphasis on the military-political dimensions of the Cold War”). The PHP website also has a good deal of material relating to the NATO side of conflict. See, for example, “Lifting the Veil on Cosmic: Declassified U.S. and British Documents on NATO Military Planning and Threat Assessments of the Warsaw Pact.” Now let me turn to the official sources. Many documents have been posted on various (mostly U.S.) government websites. The presidential libraries—and I’ll be listing their websites below in the section on archives—have put many interesting documents online. For example, at the Kennedy Library website you can see practically all the NSAMs—the National Security Action Memoranda—for the Kennedy period. At the Johnson Library website, you can access a number of oral histories, including the Rusk oral history, which you can read using Adobe Acrobat. The Ford Library also has some important material online. This includes National Security Study Memoranda and Decision Memoranda, and also a series of memoranda of conversation dealing with foreign policy and national security issues. The State Department has an Electronic Reading Room which contains over 50,000 documents released by that agency in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or in other ways. This is not the easiest search engine to use. You have to search for pages containing particular words and phrases, and that means that you’re forced to guess which words or phrases the documents you’re interested in are likely to contain. And you can’t even limit the search by date of issue, level of classification, or anything like that. This website was created under Congressional mandate, and one has the sense that in putting it together, the State Department didn’t really have its heart in it. But if you’re interested in certain specific topics—Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, CIA Creation, Kissinger Transcripts (phone conversations), and a number of other subjects—this might be a very useful source. To see what those topics are, click “Collection Descriptions” on the search page. The three collections on Chile are particularly rich. You can check the box corresponding to whatever collections you are interested in, and if you want to see a list of everything they have, click “List All.” The documents are then listed in reverse chronological order, and you can then call up the text (on pdf format) of whatever documents you’re interested in. Toward the bottom of the search page are links to collections of material released by other government agencies (and posted on the Web) as part of the Chile Declassification Project. Note also that a major collection of State Department material from 1973-75 was recently put online by the National Archives on their “Access to Archival Databases” website. For more information, click here. For access to that material, click here. This, in fact, is a very useful source if you’re working on that period. When you click into that “series description” webpage, you’ll see that the source is broken down into a number of categories. The links for the electronic telegrams for each year can be searched directly, and the listings that are generated are linked directly to pdf texts of the documents themselves. Other files available there are indexes for other sorts of material (memoranda of conversations, airgrams, memos, etc.); those documents are mostly available on microfilm, although some of them have been preserved on paper. You’re also provided with files listing withdrawn material. A “Frequently Asked Questions” handout, available on the site, tells you how to go about getting access to the material that’s not available electronically—i.e., that’s either been withdrawn, or is on the microfilms, or has been preserved on paper at the Archives. The search engine for the electronic telegrams file takes a little getting used to. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that each telegram is associated with one or more “TAGS.” You can get a list of them by clicking the “Select from Code List” link in the TAGS field in the basic fielded search engine. You then select the TAGS you want, remembering to click the “submit” button when you’re finished. The search will then generate lists of documents, each of which contains at least one of the TAGS you selected. That might be a very big list. If you want a list of documents, each of which contains two or more specific TAGS, you should use the advanced search engine and enter the TAGS in the first (“with all of the values”) field. You could also enter other text in that field—e.g., someone’s name or some topic like “Year of Europe.” Various other collections of government material can be found online. Probably the most important collection of this sort that has been made available recently can be found on the British National Archives website: The Cabinet Papers, 1915-1978. This extraordinary collection contains all the important cabinet materials, both minutes and memoranda, for that entire period. The Bundesarchiv has put the German Cabinet protocols (1949-63 so far) on its website. There is also a collection of important NATO strategy documents (assembled by Gregory Pedlow, the SHAPE historian) posted on the NATO website, and a very useful set of documents relating to the Gulf War on the GulfLink website. (To see how this source was used by one scholar, see Avigdor Haselkorn, The Continuing Storm: Iraq, Poisonous Weapons and Deterrence [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999]). And very useful collections of online material have been put out by the U.S. intelligences agencies. The National Security Agency has posted various collections of material on its website: collections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Venona, the USS Liberty affair, and so on. For a list of the NSA’s “declassification initiatives,” click here. The online CIA collections are also quite important. First of all, there’s the material available on the CIA’s “Electronic Reading Room.” You identify documents by using a typical keyword-based search engine, and this used to be very hard to use for the same reason such search engines are in general hard to use: you never really know which keywords will yield all of the documents, and only those documents, that you’re interested in. Beyond that, the documents had to be “read” (that is, transformed from a photograph into text) by a computer, using OCR (optical character recognition) technology, something which is still very far from perfect, especially when used with older documents (sometimes old-fashioned and barely-legible carbon copies). As a result, many words in the original documents wouldn’t be picked up by the search engine at all. But this search engine was modified in 2005 so that at the bottom of every page in every document in this collection, certain information was given; one of the fields listed one or more keywords that have been assigned to that document; and you were able to use those keywords in the “exact phrase” field in the advanced search window—i.e., in the link I just gave you. Moreover, by clicking the link they had there for the “Keyword List” you could see the whole list of keywords that are used in this way. That enabled you to search for particular subjects of interest to you. Once you had identified particular documents, you could also note (again, at the bottom of each page in the document) the “case number” corresponding to that document. You could then take that case number and search for it in the “document number” field in the advanced search window. Often a number of related documents turn up in this way; additional keywords are given for some of them. You could then search for those new keywords. But at some point in 2008-2009, they changed the system. You can no longer use it that way. The keyword list was removed from the website and once again you had to grope in the dark for keywords. Undoubtedly it cost the Agency money to bring about those changes in the system, changes which from the point of view of the users had a distinctly negative effect--another case of “your tax dollars at work”! What this means is that the “Special Collections” included in this website are by far the most valuable things to be found there. How do you find them? When you go into the main Electronic Reading Room webpage, you’ll notice a list of links on your left. Click “Special Collections” or just click here. The “Special Collections” page currently (April 2009) has six collections you can examine online, the most important of which for our purposes are: The National Intelligence Council (NIC) Collection (“analytic reports produced by the National Intelligence Council on a variety of geographical and functional issues since 1946”); the China Collection; the Vietnam Collection; and the Princeton Collection (“analytic reports produced by the Directorate of Intelligence on the Former Soviet Union, declassified and released for a March 2001 Conference at Princeton University”). Well-organized, browsable online indexes, with direct links to the text of the documents themselves, are available for all four collections. The first three of these collections was assembled under the auspices of the National Intelligence Council. The fourth collection—the Princeton Collection—was assembled by the CIA’s own Historical Review Office. The website for the Historical Review Office’s Collections lists three other important collections of documents said to be “available at the National Archives.” But lists of the documents contained in those collections are available online, and the links are right on this page: Declassified National Intelligence Estimates on the Soviet Union and International Communism Declassified Intelligence Estimates on Selected Free World Countries Those lists are important. The reference to the National Archives is somewhat misleading, because many of the documents cited in those lists are in fact available online. You just have to look them up in the CIA’s Electronic Reading Room. And even if that material is not in the ERR, you still may be able to find it using the DDRS or the DNSA. Moreover, 49 important documents are available in the online version of CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991, put out by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence in 2001. For other lists and perhaps more up-to-date lists of NIE’s, check the online version of another CSE publication: Listing of Declassified National Intelligence Estimates on the Soviet Union and International Communism, 1946-1984 (1996, but the website is updated periodically)—just click the links on the right to see what is available for each year. I should note, finally, that if you are interested in the early 1960s, there is a list of NIE’s (and the generally more important SNIE’s) produced from January 1960 through May 1962 that the NSC staff considered “still generally useful” available through the DDRS or by clicking here. That list might also help you search for particular documents. A great mass of declassified CIA material (8.7 million pages as of November 2003) is also available “online” through what is called the CREST (“CIA Records Search Tool) system. It used to be that to use it, you had to go to the third floor of the National Archives building and work at one of the special computer terminals that were available there. But at some point in 2008-2009 they changed the system. Now the search engine is available through the internet. Once you identify the documents you need, you can file a FOIA request for them. For more information, and for access to the search engine, click here. The search engine is OCR-based, but it seems more effective than most search engines of that sort. It pays to learn how to do the advanced search (but you can only do this at College Park—you can’t do an advanced search on the internet version). It takes a little while to get the hang of it, but you can get a lot of good material using the CREST system—or at least that was my experience when I tried it out in December 2005. For more information on CREST, click here (CIA press release). Certain documents released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act are also available online on the DoD’s FOIA Reading Room website. They’re now listed by category (“China,” “Germany,” “Carter Reagan Transition Team,” “Coalition Provisional Authority,” etc.) on the DoD FOIA website (be sure to scroll down for the list of categories). Let me also provide you with a couple of other lists of declassified DoD documents. If you see something of interest on one of those lists (note that they overlap somewhat), you could search for it on the DoD FOIA website to see if it is available online. If you can’t find it, you could ask the DoD FOIA office to send it to you as an email attachment: DoD FOIA
office’s Master Reading List: part 1; part 2 There are, in fact, many other sources that are accessible on the internet: the Pentagon Papers, for example; or Clausewitz’s On War; or the report of the Iraqi Perspectives Project on “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents”; or the Archive of European Integration at the University of Pittsburgh. The basic procedure for working with archival sources is very simple. First you identify the collections you’d like to examine and then you get the finding aids or inventories for those collections. Using those finding aids, you decide which boxes or volumes of documents you’d like to see. You then submit your request and the materials are either delivered to you or you pick them up at some central desk a little later. It’s all quite straightforward. How then do you identify the collections that are important for your purposes? You begin by looking at the guides put out by the most important official repositories. The published guides are updated periodically, and most of these repositories by now have also posted online versions of their guides on their websites. Those websites, moreover, provide you with all kinds of practical information—about when the archive is open, about what you have to do to get access to its collections, about research grants, and so on. In the United States, the presidential libraries and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, are the most important repositories for our purposes, although some of the military services have major repositories of their own: Guide to
Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States A hard copy version, edited by Robert Matchette et al., was published by NARA in 1995. The most important thing to get from either version of the guide is a sense for which record groups you might want to work with. The website has a page listing record groups by clusters that is particularly useful in this context. You might also want to take a look at James E. David, Conducting Post-World War II National Security Research in Executive Branch Records: A Comprehensive Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001; UA23 D275 2001). It is important to remember that not every collection of interest to people in our field and available in the National Archives is listed in the online guide. The Robert S. McNamara papers, located in RG 200, is currently not listed; indeed, if you look up RG 200 in the online guide, you are informed that that Record Group number is “no longer in use.” But you can often find out about such sources by talking to the archivists (in this case, in Modern Military Records, which in fact has a list of privately donated material of this sort) or to other scholars.
Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York Truman Library, Independence, Missouri Truman Papers (many finding aids linked) Other collections of papers (many finding aids linked) Eisenhower Library, Abilene Kansas List of Finding Aids (with many links to the finding aids themselves; be sure to scroll down) Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts White House Tapes: some recordings are available on the “History and Politics Out Loud” website. For transcripts, see Philip Zelikow, Ernest May, and Timothy Naftali, eds., The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: Volumes 1-3, The Great Crises (New York: Norton, 2001), or online from the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Project. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas. Guide (with finding aids) Subject Guides (NATO, Vietnam, nuclear weapons, etc.) LBJ phone conversations (some available on the C-SPAN website)
Collections (with links to finding aids) National Security Memoranda (with links to NSSMs and NSDMs) Nixon tapes (online) (some of the Nixon recordings are also available on the C-SPAN website); transcripts of phone conversations (Miller Center); Nixontapes.org (transcripts and mp3 audios) Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan Guide (with links to finding aids) Carter Library, Atlanta, Georgia Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California George H.W. Bush Library, College Station, TX Guide (with links to finding aids) Clinton Library, Little Rock, Arkansas
U.S. Army Military History Institute Research catalogue (including links to some archival material available online)
Air Force Historical Research Agency In Britain, the most important repository is now also called the National Archives. It is located in the village of Kew, between Heathrow Airport and central London. Its most important part used to be called the Public Record Office [PRO], and you’ll still often see it referred to by that name. You can work with this repository’s online catalogue in two ways: by browsing through the listings there or by conducting a search. To browse, you first look up the code for the department of government you’re interested in (“FO” for Foreign Office, “CAB” for Cabinet Office, “PREM” for Prime Minister’s Office, “DEFE” for the Ministry of Defence, to give the most important ones for our purposes—a much fuller list of department codes is available on their website). You then enter that code in the “go to reference” box and click “go.” The holdings that turn up for a particular department are broken down into consecutively-numbered classes (like “FO 371,” the political correspondence of the Foreign Office), and those classes are in turn broken down into “pieces”—that is, boxes, bound volumes, or even file folders—also numbered consecutively, beginning with 1. The piece-by-piece lists for a particular class give you a certain sense for how extensive the holdings in a particular area. And this information of course helps you decide which particular pieces are worth looking at. Click here to order material in advance of your visit. If you already have a reader’s ticket, you can put in a bulk order (for up to 50 pieces with successive piece numbers)—click here. The PRO published a number of handbooks that you may find helpful: Great Britain, Public Record Office, The Records of the Foreign Office, 1782-1968, 2nd ed. (Richmond: Public Record Office, 2002)
Great Britain, Public Record Office, The Records of the Cabinet Office to 1922 (London: H.M.S.O., 1966) Great Britain, Public Record Office Classes of Departmental Papers for 1906-1939 (London, H.M.S.O., 1966) A number of the finding aids which you can consult in the main building at Kew were published in facsimile form by the List and Index Society and can be consulted in American research libraries. If you are going to do research in this repository, these volumes might help you prepare for your stay there. They’re in fact a little easier to use than the online guide. Even if none of them relate directly to what you are interested in, you might want to take a look at one or two of them just to get a feel for the sorts of finding aids that will be available to you at Kew. Remember also that some of the collections covered here have been reproduced in microfilm collections discussed in an earlier section of this appendix. List and Index Society Lists:
Vols. 29, 41 and 52: Cabinet Office Subject Index of C.P. Papers (Cabinet Memoranda), 1919-1922 (for part of CAB 24) Vol. 40, 51: Cabinet Office Subject Index of War Cabinet Minutes 1916 Dec. – 1919 Dec. (for part of CAB 23) Vols. 61 and 62: Subject Indexes of Cabinet Office Conclusions 1919 Nov. – 1921 Dec. (for CAB 23/18 through CAB 23/28) Vol. 73 and 74: Subject Indexes of War Cabinet Minutes 1939 Sept. – 1941 Dec. and 1942 Jan. – 1945 July (CAB 65) Vols. 92 and 100: Subject Index of Cabinet Conclusions, 1922-Jan.-Oct. (for part of CAB 23) Vol. 126: Prime Minister’s Office Class List (PREM
1-6) Vols. 131, 140 and 162: Cabinet Office Class Lists: Parts I (CAB
1-36; 39, 40), II (CAB 43-47; 50-55,
57, 58; 60-100) and III (CAB 101-103, 105-111, 115, 117-119) Vol. 136: List of War Cabinet Memoranda, 1939 Sept. – 1945 July (CAB 66) Vol. 148: Cabinet Office list of War Cabinet memoranda (WPG & WPR series), 1939 Sept.-1942 Dec. (CAB 67 & 68) Vol. 156: Cabinet Office War Cabinet memoranda : general index of GT papers 1-8412 1916 Dec.-1919 Oct. (CAB 24/6-90) Vol. 199: Ramsay Macdonald Correspondence 1890-1937 (PRO 30/69) Vol. 230: Foreign Office General Correspondence: Political 1952 (FO 371/96642 through FO 371/102560) Vol. 239: Foreign Office General Correspondence: Political 1954 (FO 371/108095 through FO 371/113216) In France, there are several main repositories you should know about: the Archives nationales, the Foreign Ministry Archives (which is a separate unit), and the Service historique de la Défense, also not part of the Archives nationales. The Fontainebleau branch of Archives nationales generally houses material from the post-1958 period, but the most important collections for people in our field are actually to be found in the Paris branch: the papers of the chiefs of state (AG) and the collections of private papers (AP). Inventories for both collections are available online: AG. Papiers des chefs de l'État (through Mitterand) and État sommaire des fonds d’archives privées: Série AP (1 à 660 AP) (slow download—this has 1045 pages). For a list of finding aids to that latter collection, click here. The online guides listed there discuss parts of that series that deal with specific areas: papers of government officials, political parties, politicians in the Fourth and Fifth Republics, diplomats, for example. To see some of this material (in both the AG and the AP series), special permission is required. Better check first—you’re not always told that you need to get permission in advance. If you’re interested in working at the Archives nationales, you might want to consult some published guides: Les Archives nationales: État général des fonds, ed. J. Favier et al., 5 vols. (Paris: Archives nationales, 1978-88) Les Archives nationales: État des inventaires, ed. J. Favier et al., 4 vols. (Paris: Archives nationales, 1985-2000) Guide des papiers des ministres et secrétaires d’État de 1871 à 1974, ed. C. de Tourtier-Bonazzi and F. Pourcelet (Paris: Archives nationales, 1984) La seconde guerre mondiale: Guide des sources conservées en France, 1939-1945, ed. B. Blanc, H. Rousso, and C. de Tourtier-Bonazzi (Paris: Archives nationales, 1994) For the Foreign Ministry, there are also a number of published guides: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Les Archives du ministère des Relations extérieures depuis l'origine: histoire et guide, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1984-1985). Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Etat général des inventaires des Archives diplomatiques (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1987) Paul M. Pitman, Petit guide du lecteur des
Archives du Quai d'Orsay Various other published guides are listed on the Foreign Ministry archives website. For more detailed information, just click into the link for “inventaires” on the right-hand side of that page, and then the link for “Consulter l’état des fonds et collections,” and you’ll be able to see what finding aids exist for particular collections (either published or available only at the archives). As for the French military archives, be sure to take a look at the website for the new Service historique de la Défense. Many finding aids and lot of other useful information are available there. A little brochure giving basic information is also available online. A detailed guide to the holdings of the army branch of that archive (the former Service historique de l’Armée de Terre, or SHAT) has been published: France. Armée de Terre. Service historique [Jean-Claude Devos and Marie-Anne Corvisier-de Villèle], Guide des archives et sources complémentaires (Vincennes: Service historique de l'armée de terre, 1996). You can find other inventories to those collections by doing an author search in a library catalogue (like MELVYL) for “France. Armée de Terre. Service historique” and at the same time searching for the word “inventaire” in the title field. If you are working on the Cold War period, you might also want to take a look at Piers Ludlow’s article, “No Longer a Closed Shop: Post-1945 Research in the French Archives,” which originally appeared in the October 2001 issue of Cold War Studies. In Germany, the Foreign Office also has its own archive. A brochure on pdf describing the holdings there is available on that archive’s website. The website for the Political Archive (available in English as well as in German) contains a lot of very useful information. But quite a few important important sources are also available in the Bundesarchiv, Germany’s national archives. Many published finding aids for the Bundesarchiv collections are listed in the online Guide to Inventories and Finding Aids at the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C. (under “K” for “Koblenz,” where the Bundesarchiv is located.) Note also Frank Schumacher, Archives in Germany: An Introductory Guide to Institutions and Sources (Washington: GHI 2001), and also two guides dealing with the East German archives: Cyril Buffet's Guide des archives de l'Allemagne de l'Est, put out by the Centre Franco-Allemand de Recherches en Sciences Sociales in Berlin in 1994, and Bernd Schäfer, Henning Hoff, and Ulrich Mählert, The GDR in German Archives: A New Resource Guide (Washington: GHI, 2002). The GHI will send hard-copy versions of any of its guides to you for free upon request. Incidentally, any American scholar planning to do historical research in Germany should become familiar with the GHI website, which is packed with useful information, including information about funding. But many interesting sources are not to be found in those main national repositories. Collections of personal papers are often very valuable, and although some of them—especially in France—can be found in the main national repositories, as a general rule are housed in all sorts of places. How do you about identifying collections of papers that might be important for your purposes? You can begin by looking at some of the obvious places. In the United States, for example, many important collections can be found in the Library of Congress Manuscript Room. You could begin by logging into their basic search engine. For a list of subject categories, click the link for “subject” on the right. You could then go back and search for that phrase in the search engine. You could also browse through the LOC’s list of online finding aids or you could look at some of their subject lists. See, for example, National Security—United States and the many lists dealing with “United States—Foreign Relations” (the lists are broken down first by period and then by country) on the “U” page of the “Browse by Subject” lists. Many of those listings have finding aids attached. For more information, see John Earl Haynes, “Researching American Foreign Relations at the Library of Congress,” Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 39:3 (January 2009). There are other important repositories you might want to check out. The Mudd Library at Princeton, for example, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford each house important archival collections of interest to people in our field. For a much fuller listing of archival collections in U.S. (and British and Irish) repositories, your best bet is to use Archives Finder, an online publication from ProQuest. (Your library has to be a subscriber for you to use this search engine.) Archive Finder (which incorporates the old ArchivesUSA) brings together the information from two separate sources: (a) the information published the National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections [NUCMC], the standard catalogue of material in this area, which was published in hard-copy from 1959 to 1993, and (b) the information included in ProQuest’s own publication, the National Inventory of Document Sources (about which more later). You can search by name or by keyword; links in many of the listings will actually give you the “index terms” a particular item is listed under. This allows you to do a keyword search for particular terms that are of interest to you. This is an important research tool, but it’s not quite as good as you might think. I did a spot check, and a couple of collections I’ve used—the Bernard Brodie Papers at UCLA and the Lauris Norstad Papers at the Eisenhower library—did not even come up when I did keyword searches for Brodie’s and Norstad’s last names. Still, you can identify many sources using Archives Finder. You can also use WorldCat to identify archival material. Your best bet is to access it through your own university library’s catalogue (via FirstSearch). When you get into the WorldCat search engine, click into the “advanced search” window, select “keyword” from the search menu and type in the last name of a particular individual in the search window. Then check the box for “Archival Materials.” Then click “search.” The list that comes up might well contain some interesting archival material. This technique, moreover, is particularly useful for identifying archival material dealing with a particular subject. Say you did a search for the keyword “Kissinger” limited to “Archival Materials.” One of the many listings that come up is the Kissinger Papers at the Library of Congress. When you click into that listing, you see a whole series of linked subject headings. One of them is “United States—Foreign Relations—China.” Click into that subject link. Over 7400 listings turn up, but those listings are broken down at the top of the screen by category, and only 337 of them are listed as “archival.” By clicking on that link, you can locate some sources you perhaps did not know about dealing with that particular subject. The list includes primary source material available on microfilm. For Britain, you can search for collections of papers using the National Register of Archives, now part of the British National Archives. Click the link for “personal name.” You can then search for a particular individual, or even browse through the entire listing of holdings of personal papers. One nice thing about this search engine is that it turns up not just the collection of papers of the individual you are searching for but all collections in the database that contain something written by that individual. Some research guides are also available online at this site. For a list, click here. Those guides have descriptions of and direct links to the main repositories in a given area. See, for example, the guide to sources for the history of the armed forces. One of the archives mentioned there, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at Kings College London, has particularly good holdings and a very good website. If you’re interested in working with collections of papers in Britain, you might want to check out a couple of published guides: Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Surveys of Historical Manuscripts in the United Kingdom: A Select Bibliography, 2nd ed. (London : HMSO, 1994) Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Record repositories in Great Britain: A Geographical Directory (London : HMSO, 1991) In Germany, the institutions set up by the main political parties—the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung for the CDU and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung for the SPD—are home to the papers of many individuals connected with those parties. If you’d like to cast a somewhat broader net, take a look at Erwin Welsch, Archives and Libraries in a New Germany (New York: Council for European Studies, 1994) REF Z675.H5 W45 1994. There’s a similar guide for France, by now a little out of date: Erwin Welsch, Libraries and Archives in France: A Handbook (New York: Council for European Studies, 1979) Z797.A1 W46 1979 A French website called “BORA” (“Base d’Orientation et de Recherche dans les Archives”) is worth looking at, if you’re interested in collections of private papers in France. It now has references to material of this sort included in official repositories, and will eventually include collections of papers found in other kinds of repositories as well. One particularly important repository is part of the Centre d’histoire contemporaine at Sciences Po: the Archives d’histoire contemporaine; for a list of their collections, click here. The Council for European Studies has a webpage with links to various European archives; click into the link for “archives in Europe.” There are various other gateway websites of this sort that you might find useful. The University of Idaho Library, for example, has a very good site giving links to "Repositories of Primary Sources"; just click into the sections for European repositories. Note also UNESCO's Archives Portal website and the LSE’s Archives Made Easy website, an online guide to “archives around the globe.” If you’re interested in Russian material, be sure to check out the “ArchaeoBiblio Base” (formerly “Archives in Russia”) website. This site is connected to the guide Archives of Russia: A Directory and Bibliographic Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 2 vols., ed. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000). See also Grimsted’s two-part CWIHP working paper, “The Russian Archives Seven Years After” (September 1998): part I and part II. Note also the website for the University of Toronto’s Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project (SERAP). There is also some very useful information (about both archival and published Soviet sources) in Jonathan Haslam’s article, “Collecting and Assembling Pieces of the Jigsaw: Coping with Cold War Archives,” Cold War History, vol. 4, no. 3 (April 2004). This article also contains important information about a number of neglected archival sources (Italian, Brazilian, etc.). It’s one of a series of archival review articles published in that journal (which, by the way, is available online in a number of university libraries). That series includes the Piers Ludlow article on French archival sources already cited, an article by Leopoldo Nuti on Italian archival sources (vol. 2, no. 3, April 2002), and a number of others. So those are the basics. That’s how you go about identifying the archival sources you might like to examine. But once you’ve identified particular collections, you’d still like to get some sense for what they contain. Of course, you could wait until you arrived at the archive to see what’s in those various collections. The archivists will show you where the finding aids are, and might even provide you with certain finding aids that are not on the open shelves. You could do it that way, but the odds are that you’d like to be able to do this kind of work before you leave home—if only to be able to get some rough sense for how much time you’d need to spend in a particular repository. So is there a way of consulting those finding aids before you actually go to the archives? Well, sometimes yes and sometimes no. Many of the guides and search engines I’ve mentioned have links to finding aids. When you find ones that are of interest, you might want to download or at least bookmark them. And you can also try to see what’s included in an important publication, available in a number of university libraries and through inter-library loan: the National Inventory of Documentary Sources [NIDS]. NIDS is basically a collection of many finding aids from various U.S. sources reproduced on microfiche. You can see what they are by using the hard-copy guide. Or you can use Archives Finder to see if a finding aid for a collection you’re interested in has been included in NIDS. If it has, the “NIDS fiche number” will appear on the listing. If you want to see which finding aids in a particular repository are included in NIDS, just enter the name of the repository in the repository field in the main Archives Finder search engine and under “search options,” select “NIDS Records Only.” But it’s basically just a convenience to be able to get finding aids in advance. And whether you can do so or not, the whole process of doing archival research—identifying collections, going through the finding aids, ordering the materials you’d like to see—is on the whole very straightforward. There is, however, one exception to that general rule, and that has to do with the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The National Archives can be a very confusing place until you get the hang of it, so let me talk a bit about how it works for people in our field. When you get to the archives, the first thing you do is get an archives card. There is a small room on your right as you go in the door; they'll set you up at a computer, you enter some data, show them a picture i.d., and soon you'll have your card. You can't take things into the reading room with you without getting them specially stamped, so try to bring in as little as possible. You can drop off your extra stuff in a free locker--you need a quarter to operate it--in the basement. Then you go back to the first floor and through the control gate. After you’re checked through, you take the elevator to the second floor and go into main the reading room. After you check in there (by swiping your card—you do this either at the desk immediately to your right or, if it’s not open, at the main desk directly in front of you), you’ll probably want to start going through finding aids in order to identify the boxes you’d like to see. There are two ways you can do that. You could either go into the glass-enclosed area (the sign reads “Researcher Assistance”) to your left as you enter the main reading room on the second floor. The finding aids are arranged by record group around the wall of that area, except for the finding aids for RG 59 (the State Department materials), which are shelved after the other finding aids. The finding aids for the Nixon Presidential Materials are also in that area. Or, if you want to see a more complete collection of finding aids, and maybe talk with the archivists as well, you could go to either to room 2400 (for modern military records) or to room 2600 (for civilian records). To go to one of those rooms, you’ll need to get a pass in that glass-enclosed area and also get an escort to take you down to one of those rooms. You can fill out your order forms (also often called a “pull slips” or “service slips”) in any of these places, but you now have to hand them in in a box provided for that purpose in the glass-enclosed area—except if you’re ordering boxes from the Nixon Presidential Materials, in which case you hand in your pull slips at the desk in the reading room where you pick up your boxes. (They’ll put it in a tray below a yellow sign marked “Nixon Requests.”) You will, incidentally, need to fill out a separate form for each box, except if a number of consecutively-numbered boxes are ordered, in which case a single form can be used. But note that for any given pull time, you can order boxes from only one record group. You can, however, order a whole cartload of boxes—that is, up to 24 of them at a time—and a second cartload at another pull time. In that way, you can assure yourself of a continuous flow of material. (You can put in a third request after you’ve returned the first cartload, and so on.) Note when the boxes are pulled: 9:30, 10:30, 11:30, 1:30 and 3:30. Be sure to hand in your forms by those deadlines, because if you miss a deadline, you might have to wait an extra hour or two. This may not be a problem, of course, if you have other work in the finding aids to do, but it's a good idea to order your boxes early, because mistakes are sometimes made when boxes are pulled. Room 2400 has finding aids not just for military records, but also for things like the CIA materials and such sources as the McNamara papers. Room 2600 has finding aids for the State Department records in RG 59 and various other collections of interest, such as the NSC records in RG 273. Say you go to Room 2600 first. Unless you know your way around, you’ll probably want to meet with an archivist who will explain the basics to you and set you up with some finding aids. The State Department records are broken down into two parts: the Central File, and the Lot Files. (The Lot Files are generally the records of specific offices in the State Department.) The Central File is itself broken down into various parts, based on method of classification. Until January 1963, a decimal system was used, so these are often called the "decimal files." From 1963 to 1973, the record keepers used a "subject-numeric" system, and in 1973 the system was changed again. (On these systems, see Gerald Haines and J. Samuel Walker, “Some Sources and Problems for Diplomatic Historians in the Next Two Decades,” in Gerald Haines and J. Samuel Walker, American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review [Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981], esp. pp. 336-341.) Various finding aids for parts of the central files are available at the Archives--for example, the “Purport Lists for the Department of State Decimal File, 1910-1944,” a very detailed, document-by-document list (also available as National Archives microfilm publication M973; 654 rolls). The “Records Codification Manual” for the 1950-1963 records is also available on a single roll of microfilm (publication M1275). See also the information given for file 59.2.5 in the section on RG 59 in the National Archives online guide. The forms for boxes in the State Department Central Files are relatively easy to fill out. For the decimal series, you need in write in, in the big space at the bottom of the form where it says “record identification,” the decimal number and the date, i.e., something like “740.5611 for 1957-59.” For the line above, you also need to fill in the first two boxes, the RG number (59) and the stack area (250)—which is the same for all these records. I've included a typical service slip for the decimal files as a link. (Note that on all these service slips, in the box that says “Agency or Address” you should now write in your six-digit archives card number.) But how do you get the decimal number in the first place? There is a brief guide with the finding aids in room 2600 (the archivists will show it to you) which explains the structure of the system and tells you what the numbers mean, but that index is inadequate. For example, you can't just look up “Euratom” in the index and learn that 840.1901 is where documents on U.S. policy toward Euratom are located. You can ask the archivists to help you, but often they do not know how to find things either. Basically there are three main series of interest here, the 600, 700, and 800 series. 6xx.yy deals with political relations between country xx and yy; 7xx.subj deals with political and military affairs for country (or region) xx; 8xx.subj deals with internal economic and social affairs. Some of the main country codes are: 11 for US, 41 for Britain, 51 for France, 62 for Germany, 62a for West Germany, 61 for Russia. The same system is also used for regions: 00 for general, 40 for Europe, 50 for continental western Europe. Some of the main subject codes for our purposes are: 5 for defense, 56 for equipment, 5611 for nuclear, 5612 for missiles, and (for the 800 series), 1901 for atomic energy. The archival citation given for each document in the Foreign Relations series will help you find you way around the decimal files. (By the way, most of the volumes in this series are on the open shelves in the main reading room, so you don't have to lug your own copies from home, and you can easily compare the text of the archival version with the one found in FRUS to see what's worth xeroxing.) It is important to realize that it takes a while to get used to this system, and it often does not work the way you think it would. A lot of material on U.S.-German relations is not in 611.62, as you might think, but rather in 762.00 (“Germany—General”), and there is some good material also in 740.5. Or who would guess that 740.56 seems to be the main file on nuclear sharing and the FIG agreements (a plan for joint nuclear production between France, Italy and Germany)? Not that these files are all that rich. You wade through a lot of junk (maybe 90% of these documents aren't worth reading), and although there are a handful of interesting documents, one of the main things to note here are the cards telling you which documents have been withdrawn. If the titles look interesting, you might want to jot down the reference for a FOIA request. You should note also how you can "spread out" from the files you're going through, since when you get an interesting document, it's often marked up in the margins with cross references to other decimal files which you can then order. To save time, you can also order boxes in advance by calling (301) 713-7230 or 7250 (for State Department materials, then press 2; for military and related records, then press 1). This is especially useful if you do preliminary work in NIDS. Now let me talk about the subject-numeric part of the State Department central files, for documents from about February 1963 on. How do you find your way around the subject-numeric files? There is a short guide giving a rough explanation of this system, and again there are the references in FRUS, but your basic entrée here is the box list in the “State Department group” of finding aids in room 2600. The box list, however, gives only a fairly minimal idea of what each box contains, so you may have to grope around a bit. You order by box number. A typical order slip for the subject-numeric files is attached as a link. The lot files are more difficult to use. There is a book by Gerald
Haines describing the lot files: Gerald Haines, A Reference Guide to
United States Department of State Special Files (Westport: Greenwood,
1985). CD3031 H35 1985 You can also often find lists of relevant lot files at the beginning
of various FRUS volumes. Your main entrée into the lot files, however, will
probably be the finding aids in the “State Department group” in room 2600 (on
the left toward the back as you walk in). There are two looseleaf binders
labeled “Office Files/Lot Files.” One lists what is available by office and
the other by entry number (also called MLR number). You’d then look for
finding aids for whatever collections you’ve identified in those binders by
consulting other binders in the “State Department group” of finding aids in
that room, binders labeled by either region or topic. When you go through the finding aids in
those binders, note the lot number, MLR number, and brief title, the numbers
(and something about the content) of the boxes you’re interested in, and
above all, the location number for that lot file. The location number is
generally, but not always, written by hand into the finding aid, and looks
something like this: 250/D/15/06, or 250/62/23/5. When it’s not written in, you can find it by looking up the entry (or
MLR) number in one of the Master Location Register binders to the left of the
door (as you’re looking from inside the finding aids room); three binders
cover RG 59. (There’s another set in
the glass-enclosed area off the main reading room.) Most entries have a
simple four-digit number—e.g., 5301 for NATO Affairs, 1959-1966—and are
listed sequentially starting at the beginning of the first of the three MLR
binders; for those listings, “A1” appears just above the entry number on the
“Finding Aid” line. But if you’re
interested in an entry number that begins with “UP”—for example, UP-025, the
Hillenbrand Papers—you’ll have to go to the end of the A1 listings and then
through the UD listings until you see “UD-UP” on the “Finding Aid” line. You might not be able to locate finding aids for every lot file that
interests you. If you can’t find a
finding aid, be sure to consult one of the archivists who specializes in that
particular record group. He or she may
be able to provide you with at least a rudimentary box list for that
collection. But if you can’t get even
that, there’s no need to give up. Don’t
forget that you can still order some or all of the boxes in those
collections, which is something in fact that you might want to do, especially
if there are a small number of boxes in the lot file in question. Getting the location number is very important, since you’ll need it
to fill out your order form. You put it in the second through fifth boxes
located right above the big "record identification" box. If a
particular collection extends over a number of shelves or even compartments,
you need only put the starting location. (See the example
I put online.) You can also tell
from the location number if the collection is still classified (in which case
you can’t order it, but you can put in a FOIA request for some or all of the
material it contains—a form for this purpose is available in the
glass-enclosed area in the main reading room). Files in stack area 631—that is, with a
location number beginning with 631—fall in this category. Another important binder in the State Department Group of finding aids in Room 2600 is labeled “Conference Files.” This collection contains the records of meetings held by U.S. officials on trips, mostly abroad. For example, if you order "Conference Files for 1964-66, CF 268-269, boxes 465-466," at 150/68/28/1-7, you'll get the records of the U.S. Balance of Payments Mission to Europe of January 1968. In the back of the Conference Files binder, you'll also see a list of materials under the heading “Executive Secretariat, Briefing Books, 1958-76.” This contains some interesting material you might be surprised to find here. Boxes 3-9 in this collection, for example, contain a set of documents on U.S. relations with France, June 1958 through February 1963 (Lot 69D 150, 150/68/1/2-7). I should note more generally that there are often hidden treasures in RG 59, and it’s often hard to know how to go about discovering them. One often just stumbles across them in the course of doing something else. For example, there’s a part of RG 59 devoted to the State Department's Division of Historical Policy Research and its Predecessors, and part of this has 16 boxes of “Special Studies and Reports, 1944-50.” It’s located in 150/46/08-09/06-07. Box 4 (report no. 84) has about 400 pages of top secret teletype conferences between the State Department and the London embassy relating to the Berlin blockade affair of 1948. Box 5 has three bound volumes on the Moscow Foreign Ministers' Conference of 1947. Boxes 7-16 have an enormous amount of material on the Middle East, 1946-48. But you only find out about these things by poking around. Those State Department materials in RG 59 are very important. Certain other record groups might be worth exploring, but there’s a good chance you’ll be disappointed by what you find in those collections. The NSC documents in RG 273, for example, are not particularly rich. If you’re interested in NSC material, you’d be much better off going to the presidential libraries. The National Archives does, however, have a few things that might be worth looking at for certain purposes. There is a card catalogue in Room 2600 listing the formal NSC papers, and, as I said before, there is also a list in the Haines book. Using those lists, you can request files corresponding to specific NSC documents (NSC 68 and so on). You can also request the file for a particular NSC meeting, using (if you’re interested in the Eisenhower period) the guide to the NSC meetings I gave you above. The military sources, however, are very rich. The most important military source is RG 218, the JCS records. For materials dealing with the period through 1958, you give your request by citing a CCS number, which derives from the filing system developed for the US-British Combined Chiefs of Staff during World War II. You request, for example, “CCS 092 Germany (5-4-49) for 1958.” For the period from 1959 on, a different system was used. There are guides that explain these systems, but it is a very good idea to ask for help from the archivists. I've appended a typical cover sheet from the JCS papers for 1961. Note the list of "cross index numbers" toward the top. This sort of thing can be quite useful for “spreading out” and figuring out which boxes to order next. Another way of getting at this source, as I noted above, is by using the JCS histories, both published and unpublished. The Modern Military
Records division at the National Archives has other record groups that are of
some interest, especially for the period prior to about 1954—e.g., RG 330,
the records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). There is an
official History of the Office of the Secretary
of Defense, four volumes of
which, covering the 1947-1960 period, have been published so far: History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, gen. ed. Alfred Goldberg (Washington: OSD Historical Office, 1984- ). The footnotes in that series might help you find your way around this source. And you can use whatever help you can get, because this is not a particularly easy record group to find your way around. The same CCS system is used here as in RG 218, but apparently in a completely different way. So how then do you use RG 330? In the finding aid room off of Room 2400, there are two binders (one black, one white), each broken down into two halves (NM-12 and A-1), listing all the available components in RG 330 by entry number. Sometimes an entry number is for an index to a collection listed under another entry number. It turns out, for example, that the most important source in this collection for 1950-51 is Entry 199, OSD materials for July 1950-December 1951. But there is a very large number of boxes in Entry 199. So to identify what you want, you need to go into Entry 198, boxes 7-14, the Index for July 1950-December 1951. This gives you the file numbers for files in Entry 199. You then go to the Entry 199 folder in the RG 330 box in the finding aids room, figure out which boxes in Entry 199 correspond to the files (listed by CD number) you've identified from the index in Entry 198, and put in your request for those boxes—getting the stack location numbers from the looseleaf binders. Is it any wonder that not too many people use this source, especially when you realize that the declassifiers were notoriously conservative in releasing material in this collection? And yet it really is worth the trouble sometimes--you do come across gems in this collection from time to time, real nuggets of gold unavailable elsewhere. Some topics—especially those of continuing political importance—cannot be studied effectively on the basis of the sorts of material I’ve been talking about so far. If you’re interested in some episode that has taken place in the very recent past, or in some story that is still unfolding, you’ll have to rely on open sources: on newspaper and magazine accounts, on statements made by government officials, on testimony in Congressional hearings, and the like. That material, of course, is sometimes also worth examining even if you are interested in subjects for which a large amount of previously classified material has been made available. It is always interesting to know how a particular issue was treated in the public discussion at the time, and occasionally even important historical records are published under Congressional auspices. So let me talk briefly about material of this sort. I’ll begin by talking about newspapers and magazines, then I’ll discuss the Congressional sources, and finally I’ll talk about the material released by the executive branch, both in the United States and in other countries. Newspapers and magazines, or at least those issues that came out from about 1980 on, are now searchable electronically through LexisNexis. This allows you to do full-text searches for articles in major U.S. and non-U.S. newspapers and magazines—over 350 newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Die Zeit, Le Monde, Le Figaro and so on) and over 300 magazines (Newsweek, New Yorker, New Republic, National Review, L’Express, Der Spiegel, The Economist, etc.). Three important newspapers—the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal—can also be searched via ProQuest Newspapers. In the case of those three newspapers, there are two separate collections, an historical collection and a current collection, but together they provide full coverage from the nineteenth century through the present. Both LexisNexis and ProQuest are subscription services, and the links I just gave might won’t work if your library is not a subscriber. But anyone can search for free with the Google News Archive. The ProQuest and LexisNexis search engines allow you to do keyword searches, but this, as you know, has its problems. It’s hard to know which keywords will give you everything you want, and will not generate a mass of irrelevant material at the same time, so when you do keyword searches you pretty much have to grope in the dark. That’s why it’s important to note that the old-fashioned hard-copy newspaper indexes continue to be published, and those indexes in my view are just terrific. As I said in the text, you can learn a lot just by reading the listings in the New York Times Index, and indexes are available for a number of other major newspapers: Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and the Times of London. General interest magazines are also quite important, and played a major role in the political culture before television arrived on the scene. The basic guide to that source is the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature; the Reader’s Guide can now also be searched electronically through the WilsonWeb, another subscription service, the computerized successor to the old Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. You may want to read certain newspapers and magazines on a regular basis, especially if you are working on some contemporary issue. In that case, you should know about the many periodicals that are available through their own websites. For the European press, there is a good list, with links, on the Council for European Studies website. Charles Lipson has many links to international news sources on his website. English translations of key articles in some important non-English language periodicals are available online, at least for a certain period of time following publication of the original; Der Spiegel, for example, has an English language edition available online. The reports prepared by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, “created by the U.S. intelligence community to benefit policy makers and analysts,” and “prepared from thousands of monitored broadcasts and publications,” are another very useful source from the period from 1947 through 1996. Let me now talk a bit about published Congressional sources. If you’re studying some contemporary issue, these might well be of fundamental importance. How do you approach this material? The LexisNexis Congressional webpage is a good place to start. You can search there in various databases: the CIS [Congressional Information Service] Index, “historical indexes,” a “testimony” database, and so on. The CIS index covers the period from 1970 on, and you can search that index by subject (there’s a browsable list), by committee, by witness and in various other ways. The search can of course be limited by date. The listings that turn up sometimes have full-text links, but when they don’t you can use the title of the hearings to do a title search on a regular library catalogue. The historical indexes cover the pre-1980 period. The testimony database, which covers the post-1988 period, is particularly good if you’re studying a particular person. A search for Henry Kissinger, for example, turns up 60 references. You also have the option of searching for a particular individual by doing a witness search in the CIS index, which covers a somewhat broader period. This particular search engine, however, has its problems, and you might also want to use a browsable index, at least as a supplement. This is fairly easy to do, at least for relatively recent material. Just go to the Congress page on the GPOAccess website. You’ll find browsable lists of hearings listed by committee both for the current Congress and for previous Congresses going back to 1997. The listings are linked to full-text transcripts of those hearings, and the format is much more readable than what you get with LexisNexis. If you want to see what State Department officials have had to say when they testify before Congress, you might want to check out the “Congressional Testimony” page on the State Department’s website; the material here goes back to 1993. For older material,
Congressional sources are much harder to use.
Finding aids exist—note especially the “historical indexes” on
LexisNexis—but it’s hard to tell what’s really important amidst all the
dross. If you’re
interested in the early Cold War period, however, there is one guide that you
might find useful, at least if you’re interested in military affairs: Congressional Hearings on American Defense Policy 1947-1971: An Annotated Bibliography, comp. Richard Burt (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974). If you’d like to use unpublished Congressional material, you should take a look at Andrew L. Johns, “Needles in the Haystacks: Using Congressional Collections in Foreign Relations Research,” SHAFR Newletter, 34:1 (March 2003), 1-7; that article lists a number of indexes, guides, and websites that you might want to consult. Now, finally, let me outline some of the material that’s put out by the executive branch. In the United States, two published collections are often quite useful: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States; the online edition starts with the volume for 1991. Department of State Bulletin But if you’re working on a recent topic, you’ll probably want to rely heavily on online sources: White House website (current administration) “Briefing Room” (current news, with links to speeches, press briefings, etc.) White House material (earlier administrations): Clinton period, 1991-2001 (see esp. version 5) You can also use the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents to get access to older White House materials. Just go into the advanced search engine (http://fdsys.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/advanced/advsearchpage.action), enter your search dates, select “Compilation of Presidential Documents” as your collection, choose to do a full-text search, and then enter your search terms (e.g., Iran nuclear) and click “search.” You’ll then get a list of documents linked to the documents themselves. State Department website (current administration): Secretary of State’s remarks (current administration) Other senior officials (with links to their remarks) State Department material (earlier administrations): State Department website (G.W. Bush period, 2001-2009) State Department website (Clinton period): for 1997-2000 mainly; for 1990-1997 mainly Briefings and Statements (1993- ) For older material of this sort (foreign policy-related statements by State Department and other key executive branch officials), check out the Department of State Bulletin (for the period from 1939 through 1989) and its successor publication the Department of State Dispatch (for the 1990s). These journals are available via Hein Online through subscribing libraries. For information on how to search those periodicals using Hein Online, click here. Department of Defense DefenseLink: search engine Speeches (1995- present) (current) Secretary of Defense speeches (1995- present) (current) Transcripts (1994- present) (current) There is a big problem here that you should know about. The search engine now (2009) no longer generates lists of all the documents in the archive chosen (e.g., speeches, transcripts, etc.), but only those posted from mid-2006 on. This problem was brought to the attention of the people in charge of DefenseLink, but they are impossible to deal with and refuse to do anything about it. What then can you do? You can go into the advanced Google search engine and then enter the following in the "Search within a site or domain" field: http://www.defenselink.mil Then put in your search terms. For example, to generate lists of documents showing what then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had to say about the Iran nuclear question in 2005, enter the following terms in the "all these words" field: rumsfeld iran nuclear 2005. Note that this source needs to be used with some care. On April 21, 2004, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon had deleted certain passages from the transcripts it had just posted on this website of interviews Bob Woodward had conducted with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003 without noting that any deletions had been made. Many other countries have websites of this sort, with texts often available in English. The French Foreign Ministry website and the website for the President’s office in France, for example, have English-language versions. (For the webpage giving links to English texts of the president’s speeches for the Chirac period, click here.) The German Foreign Office website also has an English version. Various embassies in Washington also provide the text of speeches, interviews, and so on, on their websites. See, for example, the websites for the French embassy and the German embassy in Washington. It is little short of amazing how much material of this sort is available online nowadays. VI: Getting to See Classified
Material There are various things you can do if you would like to see material that’s still classified. You can, above all, try to get that material declassified. And you can go about doing that in a number of ways. You could file a request under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA], for example, or you could file a Mandatory Declassification Review [MR] request for one or more specific documents. The particular procedure you use depends on the sort of material you want. If you’re interested in material produced by a regular agency of government (like the State Department or the CIA), you’re supposed to use the FOIA procedure. The MR procedure is supposed to be used when you’re trying to see specific documents produced by the President's office and its offshoots (and that includes the NSC). What this means in practice that you’ll normally file MRs for documents in the presidential libraries, although for the newer libraries (from Reagan on) you can now also use the FOIA. (See Robert Holzweiss, “Accessing Records at Modern Presidential Libraries,” Passport, Sept. 2008.) But if you want to see classified Congressional materials—the records, for example, of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy—you can’t use either the FOIA or Mandatory Review procedure. You instead have to get in touch with the Center for Legislative Archives at (202) 501-5350 (or 5353) and they'll tell you how to proceed. How does mandatory review work? The process is quite simple. When a collection is processed, documents that haven’t been declassified are withdrawn from the files, and a “withdrawal sheet” is placed at the top of each file folder. The withdrawal sheet lists and describes documents that have been taken out. You look at the withdrawal sheets in the files that are of interest to you, and on the basis of what you see there, you fill out the form the presidential libraries have devised for this purpose. I’m putting a couple of these withdrawal sheet online—one that’s "clean" and another that's been through the mill—so you can see what they’re like. I’m also putting a blank MR list form online for the same reason. You can list a number of separate documents on a single form, provided they’re all from the same file folder. There are limits to the number of MRs you can file—that is, to the number of documents you can ask to have reviewed for declassification—within a particular period of time. You’re also not allowed to file an MR request for a particular document if it’s already been reviewed fairly recently—information about prior reviews appears on the withdrawal sheet. There are various other rules that might apply—the precise rules change from time to time. The archivists will tell you everything you need to do when you’re at the library. MR requests can take years to get processed, so this is one thing you should do early on in a multi-year project. Just file your forms (making a copy for yourself before you send it in), wait to make sure the library sends you your MR request number so you can keep track of your request (if it doesn’t, be sure to call and ask for it), and then forget about this whole business. When the documents come, you'll be pleasantly surprised by whatever they send you. The same point, of course, applies to FOIA requests. How do you use the FOIA? You (normally) write a letter. The National Security Archive has a FOIA guide on its website with some sample letters.You might also want to check (with a particular agency's FOIA office) to see whether requests should be sent to the agency of origin or to the National Archives; requests for older material often have to be sent to the National Archives.) The State Department has a FOIA website that you might want to check out. For still-classified material at the National Archives, you don’t have to write a letter; you can instead fill out a form, available in the glass-enclosed cubicle in the main reading room. I’m attaching a clean copy of that form as a link, plus a filled-out form I sent in some time ago. Department of Defense FOIA requests can also now be filed electronically, using a form for this purpose that has been posted on the web. For an example of a FOIA request along with the response to that request, click here. As a general rule, you should try to be as specific as possible in a FOIA request. This may include giving specific archival references, including references to the retired files in the Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland, where materials which are no longer in agency offices but which have not been turned over to the National Archives are generally kept. (This is what the best FOIA-requesters often do.) Also, it doesn’t hurt to explain where you found out about the particular source you’d like released (if the lead came, for example, from the footnotes in a declassified historical study) and where that source is likely to be found. You can, of course, request a number of documents in a single letter, providing they're all from the same agency. After you send in your letter, you'll generally get a preliminary response. If that doesn't include the FOIA request number you've been assigned, be sure to get in touch with the office that sent you that letter and ask what it is. If you don't do that, you'll never be able to keep track of your request. And then be prepared to wait. It can, and generally does, take years before you get anything in the mail. If your goal is just to see classified material—and not necessarily to get it released—you can sometimes proceed in a very different way. For certain classes of documents, you can get a kind of security clearance that allows you to see material of historical interest. For example, the Air Force History Support Office has (or at least at one point had) a program, called “Limited Security Access,” which enables scholars to see historical materials under Air Force control classified up to the level of secret. Call (202) 767-5764 or (202) 404-2261 for further information. I used that clearance to see not just certain Air Force materials (especially classified histories), but also to help me get access to the Rand papers, an unusually rich source. (Rand, for the period I was interested in, worked under contract for the Air Force.) (For information on the Rand archives, click here.) You have to request declassification of either specific documents, parts of documents, or your notes on those documents, in order to cite these sources. That takes a little while, but it is a lot faster and more efficient than the FOIA process. You come across other programs of this sort from time to time. At one point, for example, you had to apply for a security clearance to see the wonderful collection of Dulles State Papers at the Mudd Library in Princeton. This is no longer necessary, since that collection has now been declassified in its entirety. But the point is that programs of this sort exist, and you might want to find out if there is a program of this sort in the area you’re interested in that you might be able to take advantage of. And of course you can always talk with the archivists about what is possible—about whether there is any way to apply for special permission to see still-classified material. This applies not just to American sources, but to archival material in other countries as well. VII. Some Practical Information Copying documents: In general, it is less pleasant to work in European than in American archives. They are generally much more crowded—in the Presidential libraries, you are often the only scholar in the room, and the archivists love taking care of you. It is also generally much easier to make copies in American than in European archives, although with the increasing use of digital photography for this purpose the difference is not nearly as great as it once was. Be sure you learn the rules about copying before you arrive at an archive—about what sorts of systems are permitted, about what the exact procedure is for marking files, and so on. At College Park, for example, you need to get a "declas slip" from the person at the desk in the Central Reading Room before you begin copying previously classified material. This, it seems to me, makes little sense, since you wouldn't even be able to see the document in the first place unless it had been declassified, but it is a very minor annoyance given how user-friendly the whole system there is. Housing: Many archives will help you find a place to stay while you’re doing work there. Sometimes lists are placed on the archive’s website; see, for example, the list provided by the British National Archives. For some other leads, click here. You can also get leads by doing an h-net search. Just go into the h-net search window and search for something like “apartment rent london,” limiting the search to the past couple of months. Some lists, in fact, are very well-organized in this regard. H-German, for example, has a housing bulletin that comes out at the beginning of each month. H-France, which is not in the h-net system, also has a housing digest. There are also various publications you can use—for example, France-USA Contacts has a page on “Housing offers Paris—short-term” that might be worth looking at if you’re going to be doing research in the French capital. If you haven’t be able to find a place to stay before you arrive at your destination, you might want to check the bulletin boards at the archive. You’ll often be able to get some leads there. Funding: It's hard to do serious archival work without getting financial support of some sort or other. As it turns out, there are many sources of support available. Most of the presidential libraries have small research grant programs. If the information is not on their website, try giving them a call. There are a number of major programs--for example, programs run by the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (at the Kennedy School at Harvard), CISAC at Stanford, the National Security Education Program (undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, institutional grants), etc. Before applying to any of these programs, read their websites with some care and maybe ask them to send you copies of their annual reports. Many of these programs have a particular political "spin" that you need to be aware of before you apply, or before you even decide to apply, but you can see what it is easily enough by reading the annual report. The American Political Science Association has a webpage devoted to "grants, fellowships and funding
opportunities" and you can also do a site search for
"fellowships" using the search engine on the APSA homepage. The American
Historical Association publishes a guide of this sort: Grants,
Fellowships, and Prizes of Interest to Historians, revised periodically.
The Council for European Studies puts out a Fellowship Guide to Western
Europe. The German Historical
Institute in Washington also puts out fellowship guides periodically and
posts them online. The most recent
guide is Antje
Uhlig and Birgit Zischke: Research—Study—Funding: A German-American Guide for
Historians and Social Scientists (Washington
DC, 2005). You might also want to go into the H-Net announcements page,
click the box for “funding,” type in a recent year, maybe click the box for
“include archives,” and click search.
Some good leads might well turn up. SHAFR (the Society for Historians
of American Foreign Relations) also has a page on its website listing funding opportunities. There are a number of useful, more general guides. See for example the one put out by Women in International Security: Fellowships in International Affairs: A Guide to Opportunities in the United States and Abroad (1994). In addition to some very well-written listings, that guide also has some advice about how to write a proposal, and gives references to other useful publications in this area. For certain purposes, you might also want to take a look at Mary E. Lord and Bruce Seymore, eds., Foundations in International Affairs: Search for Security (1996), and in addition you might want to check out the section on "international studies and research abroad" in the Annual Register of Grant Support. The MIT Center for International Studies has an online database you might want to look at if you're applying for fellowships. The SSRC has a guide to writing grant proposals which you might find useful. See also the Berkeley Institute of International Studies Dissertation Proposal Workshop webpage on Conceptualizing, Writing, and Revising a Social Science Research Proposal, which you also might find useful in this connection. It also pays to keep your eyes open for things that are not listed in these guides. The Smith Richardson Foundation, for example, has a junior faculty fellowship program and is particularly interested in work in the foreign policy/military policy area. It also has a World Politics and Statecraft fellowship program for graduate students. |
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