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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:
January 2013
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. Note
that while anyone can use this website, some of the links work only from UCLA
computers. The website will be updated
about once a year.
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.
Contents of this page:
I. Published
collections of documents
II. Microfilm,
Microfiche, and CD-ROM sources
Microfilm
collections: guides
UPA (JCS papers; NSC papers)
Adam Matthew
US National Archives;
National Archives publications of German documents
British
materials
III. Online
Sources
DDRS
Digital National
Security Archive; National Security Archive
Cold War
International History Project
State Department
material
CIA material
Defense
Department FOIA release list
IV. Archival
Sources
U.S. National
Archives
Presidential
Libraries
Military archives
British National
Archives
French
archives
German
archives
Manuscript sources
(both U.S. and non-U.S.)
Russian
materials
Doing research
at the U.S. National Archives
V. Open Sources
Press
Congress
Executive branch
(U.S.)
Other countries
VI. Getting to
see classified material (and other misc. matters)
VII. Some
Practical Information (copying
documents, housing, funding)
I.
Published Documents
The 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] JX233 .A3 (for the basic collection; a non-circulating set
is in the Law School Library)
Basic FRUS website
(with links to online versions of FRUS volumes, mostly from the Kennedy
period onward; keyword searchable). The best way to buy a volume is to phone
in your order to the GPO (866- 512-1800).
Volumes
available online (1861-1960) (also
keyword searchable)
Complete
set, available through HeinOnline (subscribing libraries only)
Status
of the series (publication schedule; also indicates which volumes have
been published over the past year or so)
At UCLA,
volumes in the series dealing with specific topics are not shelved with the
basic collection, but rather have their own call numbers:
FRUS: The
Conference at Berlin (Potsdam) D734.B4 U58; Law JX1417 .U55b
1960
FRUS: Japan
1931-1941 E183.8.J2 U5; Law JX233
.J3 1943
FRUS: The Paris Peace Conference,
1919 (13 vols.) D642 .U5; Law JX1416 .U55p 1942
FRUS: The Lansing Papers E766 .U58
FRUS:
Conferences at Malta and
at Yalta D734.A1
U58
British
Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914 (11 volumes) *D505 .G79b
Documents on British Foreign
Policy, 1919-1939 (65 volumes) DA566.7 .G79d
Documents
on British Policy Overseas (for post-1945 period; 15 volumes so far) (DA588 .D63 1984) To see what is currently available for
purchase, go into the British Stationery Office website’s “advanced
search” window, type "Documents on British Policy Overseas" in the
series field, and then click “search.”
All three
series of British diplomatic documents are also available online from
ProQuest through subscribing libraries (currently not including UCLA). The whole site is searchable by keyword.
British
Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential
Print (privately published, facsimiles of the originals, covering
roughly the period from 1850-1956, over 500 volumes published so far). This
is broken down into thirteen series, each covering a particular region or
subject. The volumes are organized
chronologically within each series.
UCLA has purchased most of the series in this collection, but each
series is given a different call number.
Note that a good deal of Confidential Print material, some of it
covering the period through 1969, has been published electronically by Adam
Matthew (link).
House of Commons Parliamentary
Papers (whole collection covers 1688 to present; UCLA subscription covers
19th century)
British Parliamentary Papers
(UCLA Library research guide)
Searching
strategies
Documents
diplomatiques français (various series, covering from 1871 through the
1960s). List
by series.
1871-1914 series: * D397 .F84d plus
SRLF
1932-39 series: DC396 .A5 1963
1954- series;
UCLA Library has volumes for 1966 on: JX603 A35 (not included in library
catalog)
Full
list of German diplomatic documents (from German
Foreign Office archives website)
Die grosse
Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871-1914 (40 volumes in 54) SRLF
French translation: La
Politique extérieure de l’Allemagne, 1870-1914 (32 volumes). (D394
G31p—not included in library catalogue)
Akten zur
deutschen auswärtigen Politik, 1918-1945 (62
volumes in 5 series). JX691 .A5 1949G; Law KZ691 .A5 1949
Two of those series (Series C
and Series D) were also published in English translation: Documents on
German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945 (18 volumes, covering the period from
1933 to 1941). JX691 .A5 1949; Law
KZ691 .A5 1949; SLRF
At least seven of those volumes
from Series D (covering the 1937-45 period) have
been posted online. All have links to
pdf copies of the original volumes:
Series D (1937-45),
vol. 4
Series
D (1937-45), vol. 5
Series
D (1937-45), vol. 6
Series
D (1937-45), vol. 7
Series D
(1937-45), vol. 8
Series
D (1937-45), vol. 12
Series
D (1937-45), vol. 13
Akten zur
auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (covers the period
from 1949 on, with at least a single volume for each year; over 40 volumes
published so far, dealing with the 1949-53 and 1963-79 periods). DD258.8
.A38. Some volumes available in part through Google
Books.
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) SRLF
Krasnyĭ
arkhiv (106 vols) DK1 .K86
Note also Peter Blitstein’s “Selected
Bibliography of Recent Published Document Collections on Soviet History” (1999) (This bibliography includes a
section on late imperial Russia)
and Norman Naimark’s “Cold War Studies and New Archival Materials on Stalin,”
Russian Review (January 2002).
You should remember, of course, that other governments—Australia, Canada,
Italy, and Belgium
to name just a few of the western ones—also publish collections of
documents. The Documents
on Australian Foreign Policy for 1937-59 (20 vols.) and the Documents
on Canadian External Relations
(the 16 vols. covering 1946-60) are available online. 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 [Z6205 .B47;
*Z6204 .B59 1982], interspersed with listings of books and articles dealing
with the same general subject.
II. Microfilm, Microfiche, and CD-ROM Material
It’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 using
WorldCat, which you can get into at UCLA by going into the MELVYL catalogue. Just make sure you don’t limit your search
to UCLA or the University
of California system; “Libraries
Worldwide” should appear in the “Narrow Your Search” section of the search
engine.
How do you identify
material of this sort you might be interested in? You can identify some of these sources
using the basic library search engines, but that method is often pretty
hit-or-miss, so you should probably use a number of approaches. You could start, for example, with the Library
of Congress catalogue. 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).
If your keyword is a phrase, make sure you enclose it in quotation
marks or the search won’t work. If you
go into a particularly listing, you can click the tab for “subjects/content”
and then click into the links for the subject headings you’ll find
there. But how well you do with this
method really depends on your ability to guess the right keywords. So you might also want to go 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 good
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). Ref Z1033.M5 L53 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.
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. UCLA has both of these collections, but not
in their entirety, and unfortunately our holdings are something of a mess. For the Documents of the National
Security Council series, the guide to the original collection plus the
guides to the first three supplements are in the microfilm area (UA 10.5
N37—ask at the desk there); the guides to supplements 4-6 are also in the
microfilm area in YRL, but have a different call number (UA23.15 D63 1987,
UA23.15 D63 1991, and UA23.15 D63 1993, respectively). Supplements 7 through 9 are evidently not
in the UCLA library. The guides are,
however, available on the UPA website; click here. The microfilm itself is in SRLF and has to
be ordered separately using the “request” tab in the regular UCLA
library catalogue.
For the Minutes of Meetings
of the National Security Council series, the guides for supplements 1 and
2 at UCLA are in the microfilm area (UA23 M562 1988), but not the guide for
the original collection. The guides to both NSC collections (documents and
meetings) are, however, available on the UPA website. As for the microfilm itself, the microfilm
for the original collection (UA10.5 N39) can be found in the microfilm area,
and and the microfilm for the first two supplements is also stored there
(UA23 M562 1988 according to one catalog listing—although another listing
gives the call number for the first supplement as UA23 M56 1988). According to the library catalog, the two
supplements are in SRLF, and the reels have to be ordered using the UCLA
library catalogue. UCLA evidently does not own the third or fourth
supplements, but by using the online guides on the UPA website (the link is
given above), you can identify the reels you need to see and order them
through interlibrary loan.
How do you use the NSC
material? The microfilm collections,
as noted above, come with guides. You can either use those guides, or better
yet, you could use the very good 721-page cumulative index to both
collections: the Index to Documents of the National Security Council
(*UA10.5 N37 I38 1994, in the YRL stacks—the asterisk means it’s shelved with
the large-sized books). 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. 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
(CD3031 H35 1985), 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 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. A
list of NSC
meetings for the Truman period is also available online.
Specific types of NSC
documents (e.g., National Security Action Memoranda for the Kennedy period,
National Security Decision Memoranda for the Nixon period, and so on) can be
found using the following online guides:
Presidential
Directives and Where to Find Them (Library of Congress) and Presidential Directives and
Executive Orders (Federation of American Scientists; many linked to
texts). Note also the collection of “Presidential
Directives on National Security from Truman to Clinton” on the Digital
National Security Archive website.
Here are some other
interesting UPA collections:
Eisenhower
National Security Files (with online guides)
John F. Kennedy National Security Files,
1961-1963:
(MicroServ UA855 .J64 1988, with guide)
The Lyndon
B. Johnson National Security Files, 1963-1969 (with guides)
(MicroServ DT38 .L96 1987, with guide)
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 (UCLA
has guide only: YRL E855 .P37 1987, but reels are at UC Irvine and can be
ordered easily through MELVYL)
Nixon
National Security Files
Primary Source Media (an imprint
of Gale, formerly 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” (18th and 19th
centuries), and a couple of collections of Churchill Papers (The Sir
Winston Churchill Papers—subsets
with links to guides; and Churchill
at War). This firm 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.” Online
guides are linked to the lists on the two following webpages: Primary Source Media
and Scholarly Resources. There’s also a list of guides broken
down by subject; click “I” for “international.” Here are some of the collections listed
there (with links to the guides):
Papers
of Henry Lewis Stimson, 1867-1950 [Collection Information]
[Guide]
Diaries
of Henry Lewis Stimson, 1909-1945 [Collection Information]
[Guide]
George
W. Ball Papers [Guide]
Gerald
R. Ford and Foreign Affairs:
Part
1: National Security Advisor’s Files, Section 1: Presidential Country Files
for East Asia and the Pacific [Guide]
Part
1: National Security Advisor’s Files, Section 2: Presidential Correspondence
and Conversations with Foreign Leaders [Guide]
Jimmy
Carter and Foreign Affairs:
Part
1: White House Central Files, Section 1: Foreign Affairs Subject File [Guide]
George
H. W. Bush and Foreign Affairs 1989-1993:
Part
1: The Moscow Summit
and the Dissolution of the USSR
[Guide]
Part
2: Bosnia and the
Situation in the Former Yugoslavia
[Guide]
Part
3: Fall of the Berlin Wall and the
Reunification of Germany
[Guide]
Part
4: The Middle East Peace Conference
Madrid, Spain
[Guide]
Cyprus
Crisis, 1967: The State Department’s Crisis Files [Guide]
U.S. Relations with Panama and Operation Just
Cause [Guide]
Documenting
the Peruvian Insurrection [Guide]
Russian
Archives: Cold War and Central Committee:
Series
1: The International Department, 1953-1957 [Guide]
Series
2: The General Department of the Central Committee, 1953-1966 [Guide]
Series 3: Congresses of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1955-1986 [Guide]
Series 4: Plenums of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1941-1990 [Guide]
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 (pdf
guide).
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, 1949-1980
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 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. (The holdings at the National Archives 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)
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) REF CD1265 1959
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 ). REF CD1265 1962
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).
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. In one of the search windows, select “subject”
from the drop-down menu and type in something like “Great Britain Foreign
relations Sources.” If you click
“search” at this point, the search engine will 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, you can no longer select
“microform” from the “format” menu at the bottom of the screen; select “archival
material” instead. This search can generate listings from all the libraries
in the WorldCat system;
many items turn up more than once. But in either window, you
can limit the search to items at UCLA, or in the University of California
system (items from other UC libraries are very easy to get using the
“Request” button). Many items that
turn up in such a search 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.
You might think that you
can identify sources available on microfilm by making “microfilm” (or even
“microform”) one of the keywords you use in your search, but that 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. As you’ll see, many of them
have to be ordered through inter-library loan from the Center for Research
Libraries [CRL] or from other campuses in the UC system. But this is very easy to do through
MELVYL: just click the “request”
button toward the
top of a particular listing. The
listings marked with an asterisk are, as it turned out, covered by finding
aids published by the List and Index Society (CD1043 L696L),
which I’ll talk about in more detail later in the section on archival
research. But note that many Cabinet
papers from the period from 1919 to 1981 are available online, as noted below.
Committee of Imperial Defence and
Standing Defence Sub-committee [CAB 2]: Minutes,
1902-1939. CRL
*Cabinet
Minutes and Memoranda, 1916-1939 [CAB
23 and 24]. UCD and CRL; guide in
SRLF. 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 UCI
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] UCSD
Papers and Minutes of the British
Secretariat to the Supreme War Council, 1917-1919.
[CAB 25] CRL
Proceedings and
Conclusions of Anglo-French and Allied Conferences, 1915-1920 [CAB
28] CRL
Cabinet
Papers, 1880-1916. [CAB 37/1-162]
UCSD
Records of the Committee of
Imperial Defence, 1888-1914 [CAB 38] CRL, UCSD
Cabinet Letters in Royal Archives,
1868-1916. [CAB
41/1-37] UCSD
Chiefs of Staff Committee, Minutes of Meetings and Papers,
1934-1939
[CAB 53/1-55] UCI
*Cabinet
Minutes, 1939-1945 [CAB 65/1-55] UCI
See
List and Index Society vols. 71 and 74
*War Cabinet Minutes
and Papers, 1939-1941 [CAB 67] CRL
See List and Index Society vol.
148
*War Cabinet Minutes and
Papers, 1939-1942. Memoranda (WP(G) Series) [CAB 68] CRL
See List and Index
Society vol. 148
Chiefs of Staff Committee. Minutes, 1939-1946 [CAB 79] CRL
Chiefs of Staff Committee, Memoranda and Minutes [CAB 80/1-22, 104-105] UCI
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 CRL
Joint Planning Committee of the
Committee of Imperial Defence and the War Cabinet, Minutes of Meetings [CAB
84] UCI
Chiefs of Staff Committee, Anglo-French Committees: Minutes
of Meetings, 1939-1940
[CAB 85/1-64] UCI
Chiefs
of Staff Committee Papers, 1942-1947 [CAB 88/1-39] UCI
Commonwealth
and International Conferences, Minutes and Papers, 1939-1945. [CAB
99] CRL
Cabinet Minutes (CM and CC
Series), 1945-1974. [CAB 128] CRL
Cabinet Memoranda (CP and C
Series), 1945-1972. [CAB 129] CRL
III. Online Sources
In
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. If you’re
with UCLA, to get access to it, you’ll therefore need either to log in from a
computer on campus or use the proxy server.
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, 1973–1990
The
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
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 “Digital Archive” is composed of a series of collections of
documents, often translated from Russian, east European, or Asian Communist
original texts (list of collections, linked to the collections
themselves). 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. The CWIHP has also posted a collection of E-dossiers, presenting “new and important accessions to the
CWIHP ‘Virtual Archive.’” Those
documents were drawn from the Russian and East-Bloc Documents Database
(jointly sponsored by the CWIHP and the National Security Archive).
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”—click the link for “collections”). 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.” If you’re interested in the Vietnam War,
you might want to check out the Vietnam Center and Archive website
(sponsored by Texas Tech). Many
documents have been digitized and posted on this website. See especially their webpage on their most frequently used collections.
Another very important online source has been set up by the Miller Center
at the University
of Virginia. Their Presidential
Recordings Program has a website at which you can find tapes and
transcripts of recordings made by every U.S.
president from Roosevelt to Nixon. And many oral history interviews are
available online. See, for example,
the collection of interviews on nuclear issues in
WGBH’s Open Vault; the interviews done for the CSIS’s US-UK Nuclear History Project; and
the Brookings NSC project oral history collection.
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. The Ford Library also has some important
material online. This includes a set of National Security Study Memoranda and Decision
Memoranda; a set of Kissinger “memcons” (National Security Adviser: Memoranda of Conservations)
(includes some material from the late Nixon period); a set of NSC minutes, and a set of memcons and other material relating to Kissinger’s
meetings with leaders of China, the USSR, and Middle Eastern countries. See
also the page on “Digitized Memoranda of Presidential Conversations” in the
Ford Library website. These
collections, and other collections that have been put online, are listed
(with links) in the Ford Presidential Digital Library
webpage: included documents on the Vladivostok summit and
the Vietnam War, and the Arthur Burns diary (for 1969-74). Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s NATO
ambassador, has made a number of documents relating to this period available
online: see the Rumsfeld Papers website.
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
1973-76 has been 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 gives you more information about this source.
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, 1915-1982. This extraordinary collection contains all
the important cabinet materials, both minutes and memoranda, for that entire
period. (You might want to use them in
conjunction with the List and Index Society lists in YRL which I discuss later
in the section dealing with archives.)
There are actually quite a few documents of interest to people in our
field available on the BNA website. Go
into the DocumentsOnline page and look at the list of
“other records” on the lower part of that page. This includes various documents relating to
foreign and military affairs, as well as over 13,000 documents from the Eden papers. Some of
this material (including the whole Cabinet Papers collection) is available
free of charge. The British also have
a Freedom of Information Act. Some of
the more important documents the British release each year are available
online, at least in part: latest releases; releases archive.
Other countries have also started putting material of this sort on the
internet. The Bundesarchiv has put the
German Cabinet protocols
(1949-67 so far) on its website. Some
French materials are available online—for example, a collection of documents relating to the 1991 Moscow Putsch. There is also a collection of important NATO strategy documents (assembled by Gregory Pedlow, the SHAPE historian)
posted on the NATO Archives website; that website, in fact, has
other interesting material as well. There is 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 information on the NSA’s
“declassification and transparency” program, click here.
The online CIA collections are also quite important. There’s a lot of material available on the
CIA’s “Electronic Reading Room.” That search engine used to be much more
user-friendly than it is today. Beginning
in 2005 it was changed so that at the bottom of every page in every document that
was posted in this collection, certain information was given; one of the
fields listed one or more keywords that had been assigned to that document;
and you were able to use those keywords in the “exact phrase” field in the
advanced search window, which was still available at that time. 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. In that way you
could search for particular subjects of interest to you. Moreover, 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 turned up in this way, and
additional keywords were given for some of them. You could then search for those new
keywords.
But you can no longer use it that way. At some point in 2008-2009—I’m not sure
whether this was before or after the change of administration in Washington—they changed
the system. The keyword list was
removed from the website and once again you had to grope in the dark for
keywords (as you had to do before 2005).
And indeed today you can no longer do an advanced search (even though
they left a meaningless link to “advanced search” on the search engine). Undoubtedly it cost the Agency money to
bring about those 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 (May 2011) has about twenty 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
Declassified Intelligence Analyses on the Former
Soviet Union Produced by CIA's Directorate of Intelligence
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 (over 11 million pages as of May
2013) 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 now you can also search
for CREST material using the basic CIA FOIA search engine I
referred to above. If you just leave
the search field blank and click “search,” every document in the collection
turns up, and you can focus on what you’re interested in by using the filters
on the right. You can, for example,
filter by collection. The CREST
collection (over 700,000 documents) and the FOIA collection (over 20,000
documents) are the largest collections, but many smaller collections (containing
8000 documents in toto) are also included here. You can also filter by geographic region or
functional area (e.g., “strategic and nuclear issues”) or by publication type
(e.g., National Intelligence Estimates), but only for material in the NIC
Collection. You’ll note that some documents
in the CREST collection (called “Best of CREST”) are available here as pdf’s. If you’re interested in something that hasn’t
been posted in that way, you can get it by filing a FOIA request. Since it’s already been declassified, those
requests tend to be processed quickly.
The problem is that the search engine gives you so little information
about a document that it’s often very hard to separate the wheat from the
chaff and know which documents are worth requesting.
To use the CREST collection more efficiently, you have to go to College Park. Using one of the CREST terminals there, you
can actually browse the CREST database and zero in on particular “jobs” that
contain material of interest to you. A
“job” is a set of retired documents.
It contains one or more boxes, and each box contains a number of
folders, each in turn containing a number of documents. When you double-click on a folder on the
left of the CREST main window, a list of documents appears, with titles, on
the main part of that window. You can
view a particular document just by double-clicking on it, and if you’re
interested in it you can print it out for free.
You can get a sense for which “jobs” or even boxes might be of interest
to you by using the search engine available on the internet. You’ll notice that when you do a search for
a particular keyword on the basic CIA FOIA search engine, the CREST documents
that turn up are identified by particular document numbers, called ESDN’s
(for Executive Standard Document Numbers).
Here, for example, is a typical ESDN that turns up when one does a
search on that search engine:
Doc No/ESDN: CIA-RDP79T00975A002900090001-0
Here’s how to decode
it. After the “CIA-RDP,” which gives
info about the originating agency, the next nine digits give you the job
identifier (in this case 79T00975A). This is followed by four digits giving you
the box number (0029), then by another four digits for the folder number (0009),
and then finally by the document number (0001-0). Using one of the CREST terminals in College Park, you can
browse to that particular job, box, and folder, to find related documents. All these things are explained in a CREST user manual from 2003 which has been
posted on the Federation of American Scientists website. Although the system
has been slightly updated, that manual will give you a good feel for how the
system at College Park
actually works today (May 2013). For
more information about the CREST system, click here or 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 (click the link for “FOIA Library”). Then
click into the various headings you’ll find there: International Security Affairs, Joint
Staff, Operations and Plans, etc. Various documents are listed under those
headings by category (e.g., “China,”
“Germany,”
“Coalition Provisional Authority,” etc.) and you can click into the
description to see the whole document.
Here’s another list of declassified DoD documents (from
2002). If you see something of
interest on that list, 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. Note also the material in
the special collections section of the DoD’s FOIA
website, especially the Rumsfeld material relating to Iraq.
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; or the Vietnam Virtual Archive at Texas Tech (currently containing “3.2 million
pages of scanned material”).
IV. Archival Sources
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:
National Archives website
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 (Maps/Govt * CD3023
.A46 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 collection of Robert
S. McNamara papers, for example, is not listed there, although it is listed
in ARC (ARC Identifier 574750). 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. You might, by the way, want to take a look
at ARC before you go to the Archives.
Although it’s a bit unwieldy, it does have a lot of information.
Presidential
Libraries:
Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New
York
Archives
page
List
of collections with links to online finding aids; the finding aids are keyword searchable
Truman Library, Independence, Missouri
Subject Guides
Truman Papers (many
finding aids linked)
Other collections of papers
(many finding aids linked)
“Foreign
Policy and the Truman Administration:
Historical Resources at the Harry S Truman Library” (Randy Sowell)
Eisenhower
Library, Abilene Kansas
List of
Finding Aids (with many links to the finding aids themselves; be sure to
scroll down)
“Declassification
at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library” (David Haight)
Declassified documents (2012)
(2011)
(2010)
(pre-2010)
Online
documents
Kennedy
Library, Boston, Massachusetts
Search
Engine
Research
Guides
National Security Files (finding
aid)
Digital
Archive (with links to finding aids)
President’s
Office Files (digitized—facsimiles available online) (finding
aid—with links to documents)
Presidential recordings: listed and described in that finding aid;
descriptions linked to actual tapes (so you can listen online). Note that some transcripts, as well as more
easily downloadable versions of the tapes, are available on the Miller Center
Presidential Recordings Program website.
Three volumes, dealing with the Berlin
and Cuban Missile crises, have already been posted there. Two additional volumes, covering the period
from October 29, 1962, through February 15, 1963, will be coming out in 2013.
Oral
histories
My “Guide
to the Kennedy Tapes and Other Source Material Available Online Relating to
U.S. policy on Vietnam, 1961-63” might also be worth looking at if you
plan on using the Kennedy tapes.
Although it deals mainly with Vietnam-related material, it might help
you learn how to use the
tapes even if you’re working on some other topic.
Johnson Library,
Austin, Texas.
Guide
(with finding aids)
Subject
Guides (NATO, Vietnam,
nuclear weapons, etc.)
LBJ
phone conversations
Miller Center
materials: transcripts;
tapes. Much of this material has been
published: The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson (8 vols. so far);
a digital
edition is also available
What
Is New at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum? (by John Wilson,
published in Passport in 2004)
LBJ and Foreign Affairs (microfilm,
from Primary Source Media): subject
file; Vietnam
file (linked to guides)
Nixon Library,
Yorba Linda, California (from July 1, 2010)
Information for
researchers
Collections
(with links to finding aids)
Collections
by subject
NSC
Files
National Security Memoranda (with links to NSSMs
and NSDMs)
Virtual Library with
links to new release announcements, which often have links to full text of a
number of documents
Nixon tapes (finding aid)
Nixon
tapes (online).
Tapes and transcripts are also available on the Miller Center’s
Presidential Recordings Programs’s website and at Luke Nichter’s Nixontapes.org website (transcripts and mp3
audios)
Lists of documents released as a result of Mandatory Declassification Review requests:
November
2011; July
2010; Jan.
2010; June
2009; Dec.
2008; Nov.
2007; Systematic Review opening, June
2012
Note also Edward Keefer, “Key
Sources for Nixon’s Foreign Policy” (SHAFR Newsletter, 2007); and
Edward C. Keefer, John M. Carland, and
Bradley L. Coleman, Foreign Relations of the United States Guide to Sources on Vietnam, 1969-1975
(2012)
Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Guide (with
links to finding aids)
SHAFR
guide
Digital
Library—Foreign Affairs and National Security
Memoranda of
Presidential Conversations (includes late Nixon period)
NSC
meeting minutes
NSSM’s
and NSDM’s
Kissinger phone conversations
National Security Advisor’s papers
(microfilm, from Primary Source Media): part
1 (linked to guide); part
2 (presidential correspondence and conversations with foreign leaders)
Carter Library, Atlanta, Georgia
Guide
Searching the
Carter Library’s holdings using ARC
Some documents from the Carter
Library have been posted on the Margaret
Thatcher Foundation website
Jimmy Carter and Foreign Affairs, Foreign
Affairs Subject file (microfilm, from Primary Source Media) (with link to
guide)
Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California
List of collections
A collection of documents from this
repository is available on the Reagan
Files website, put together by Jason Saltoun-Ebin
George
H.W. Bush Library, College Station,
TX
Guide (with
links to finding aids)
Clinton Library, Little
Rock, Arkansas
Presidential Decision and
Review Directives
Declassified records
relating to foreign policy and national security
Military
Archives:
U.S. Army
Military History Institute
Research catalogue
(including links to some archival material available online)
Air
Force Historical Research Agency
Personal Papers
Numbered historical studies (links to
texts)
Air Force Historical Studies
Office (USAF “book writing element”)
Naval Historical Center
Personal Papers
Naval Operational
Archives
Guide
to United States Naval Administrative Histories of World War II (with
links to full-text histories). Note
that the Hyperwar website has
links to full-text versions of many official World War II military histories.
National Defense
University Manuscript Collections
Conflict
Records Research Center, National Defense University
Captured records relating to Saddam’s Iraq
and Al Qaeda; currently (Sept. 2010) over 30,000 pages available
MERLN (Military
Education Research Library Network) Digital Collections
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)
CD1051 .A6 2002
Great
Britain, Public Record Office, The Records of the Cabinet Office to 1922 (London: H.M.S.O., 1966) CD1047 .C3 1966
Great
Britain, Public Record Office Classes of Departmental Papers for 1906-1939
(London, H.M.S.O., 1966). CD1046 1966 .A5
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
(CD1043 L696L):
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 Mitterrand—for
detailed finding aids, click where it says “voir l’Etat général des fonds mis
à jour”) and État
sommaire des fonds d’archives privées:
Série AP (1 à 671 AP) (slow download—this has over a thousand
pages). There are various guides that
show which parts of that series deal with specific areas: papers
of government officials (20th century), political
parties, newspapers
and journalists, politicians
in the Fourth and Fifth Republics, and diplomats,
for example. A number of inventories
for particular collections in that series are available online; for a list,
click here. 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
(Paris: Association des Amis des Archives diplomatiques, 1993). Also available in English.
Various other published
guides are listed on the Foreign
Ministry archives website. For a
list of other finding aids available on pdf, click here.
As for the French military archives, the new website for the Service historique
de la Défense does not provide much information. Many finding aids and
lot of other useful information used to be available there, but right now
(Feb. 2013) there’s not much. They may
improve it in the future. A little
brochure giving basic information is, however, 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. A wonderful collection of
Charles de Gaulle’s
public appearances (including his famous “press conferences”) is
available online (audios, videos, transcripts) and is very much worth taking
a look at.
In Germany,
the Foreign Office also has its own archive. A brochure
is available on that archive’s website.
The website
for the Political Archive contains a lot of very useful information. But quite a few 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. Choose, for example, National
Security—United States; there are also many lists dealing with “United States—Foreign
Relations”. 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 (finding aids)
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 Archive
Finder, an online publication from ProQuest. 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 or NIDS (about which more later), including
NIDS UK/Ireland. 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. You can
do a WorldCat search directly by going into the advanced MELVYL search engine. Just make sure you select “Libraries
Worldwide” and not “University
of California Libraries”
in the “Narrow Your Search” section at the bottom of the screen. The results of your search will be listed
in the next window. You can then limit
the listings by checking the “archival material” box on the form list on the
left side of the screen. Some of that
archival material is in fact available on microfilm, and if you home library
doesn’t own it, you might be able to request it through inter-library loan.
This technique, moreover,
is particularly useful for identifying archival material dealing with a
particular subject. Say you did an
author search “Kissinger, Henry” and then limited the listings to “Archival
Materials.” One of the items 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 11,000 items turn up, but you can
check the “Archival Materials” box at the left, you can generate a list of
only a few hundred items. You can in
that way locate some sources you perhaps did not know about dealing with that
particular subject.
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. For the
Thatcher period, a number of guides are available online on the Margaret
Thatcher foundation website. JANUS
is a gateway website for archives and manuscripts in the Cambridge area.
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) Z2016 .G74 1994
Royal
Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Record repositories in Great Britain:
A Geographical Directory (London : HMSO, 1991) CD1040 .G73 1991
In Germany,
the institutions set up by the main political parties—the Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische
Politik (part of 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 and libraries (and also is coming out with a guide
to centers and other outfits devoted to the study of 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), and also Norman Naimark, “Cold War Studies and New Archival
Materials on Stalin,” Russian
Review 61, No. 1 (Jan., 2002)
. See also: “Miller
Center and Russian State Archives Announce Joint Project to Release and
Publish Once Secret Kremlin Records from the Khrushchev Era.”
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. I also found an article by
David Messenger called “Researching
Modern International History in Madrid” on the SHAFR website.
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 Archive 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.
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- ). UA23.6 .H57
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.
V. Open Sources
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.
(Even if you’re working from a campus computer or using the UCLA proxy
server, that link will work only about half the time. If it doesn’t work, click into the UCLA
Library Catalog, click “advanced search,” then at the bottom click the
link for “Article Databases,” and then click the link for “A-Z List of
Databases.” LexisNexis is listed under
“L.” Once you get into the database, you’ll be
able 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. Select what you want
to search for by clicking into the “databases” link at the top; or just click
on “News and Newspaper” to go into a new search window that will also allow
you to select which newspapers you want to search in—but if you’re interested
in something that’s not recent, be sure the “ProQuest Historical Newspapers”
version of the paper is checked, and not just the regular version. See also the ProQuest/Chadwyck Healey
gateway webpage Historical
Newspapers (mainly Times of
London), and
also, for that newspaper, the Times
Digital Archive (1785-1985).. You
can also search for old newspaper articles 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 (REF AI 21
L891), and indexes are available for a number of other major newspapers: Washington Post (REF AI 21 W276
O332), Los Angeles Times (REF AI21 L891), Le Monde (REF AI21
M7), Times of London (REF AN L Index—this covers the whole period from
1790 to the present). 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 (REF AI3 R22); 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. To get access to it at UCLA, click into the “Article Databases”
link at the top left of the MELVYL homepage, then click again into “Article
Databases,” then into the “A-Z List of Databases,” then in “R,” and then into
the first link in the listing for “Reader’s guide retrospective.”
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 newspapers with online editions on his website: see especially Middle East News and
World News. (The Lipson website is in fact loaded with
all kinds of links of interest to people in our field.) 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. The reports themselves are on microfiche;
for UCLA’s holdings, consult the UCLA
Library catalog.
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. In
that case, you might want to take a look at the new Federal Digital System
website. In the list of “Featured
Collections” on the right, you’ll see links for Congressional hearings,
reports, and documents, from the mid-1980s on. Those documents are all available online in
pdf format. 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). SRLF
Some important collections of Congressional
material are available online. The Pearl
Harbor Attack hearings (with exhibits) are available as
keyword-searchable pdfs
on the
Internet Archive website. The hearings
are in parts 1-11 and the exhibits are in parts 12-39. There are indexes to testimony by witness
and a list of the exhibits are the beginning of the
appropriate volumes.
The important series Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee (Historical Series) (20
vols., covering 1947-68, and published years later) is now also available
online. Go into the ProQuest
Congressional Publications search window and search for “Executive
Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.” The listings that turn up give direct links
to keyword-searchable pdf copies of the hearings.
There’s also a website that gives
links to Congressional material
(hearings, reports, etc.) related to intelligence, 1989-present.
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, beginning with the
president. The Public
Papers of the Presidents of the United States (MAPS GOVT J80
.A283) is a basic source. You can
access this series via HeinOnline:
Public
Papers and Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Public
Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Hoover, and then Truman through Obama)
If you’re working on a recent
topic, a vast wealth of material is available online:
White House website (current
administration)
“Briefing Room” (current news,
with links to speeches, press briefings, etc.)
White House material for G.W. Bush period,
2001-2009
You can also use the Weekly Compilation of Presidential
Documents to get access to White House materials, including a lot of older
material. Just go into the GPO’s advanced
search engine, 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.
The State and Defense Departments have very good websites:
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 (JX232 .A31, 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 (including UCLA).
Department
of Defense main website: search
engine
Speeches (1995- present) (current)
Secretary of
Defense speeches (1995- present) (current)
Transcripts
(1994- present) (current)
The search engine here is not very good. Even the advanced search engine does not allow
you to limit the search by date or document type (speeches, transcripts,
etc.). To get around it, 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.defense.gov 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.
If you are just interested in one type of document,
just enter the corresponding URL in the “Search within a site or domain”
field. For example, if you just want
to see what Rumsfeld had to say about the issue in his speeches, enter http://www.defense.gov/speeches/SecDefArchive.aspx
in that field. 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 German
Foreign Office website both have English-language versions. 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’d 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. (To
see just how long it takes to process MR’s even at the National Archives, take a look at the logs
posted online. Other FOIA logs are
posted on the same website where I found this one,
http://www.governmentattic.org/.)
How do you use the FOIA? You (normally) write a letter. The National
Security Archive has a FOIA
guide on its website. 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, which, incidentally also has its own FOIA Guide.) The
State Department has a FOIA website
that you might want to check out; it actually has a “FOIA request generator.” For links to other U.S. government FOIA offices,
click here. 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.
A sample
request letter can also be found at the end of the DoD FOIA handbook.
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 Historical Studies 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. If you’re interested in exploring this option, you can contact them for more
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. See also “Renting
an apartment in Paris”. You can
sometimes get good information about housing by calling or email the archive
you’ll be visiting. 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. Here are two other good websites for short-
and medium-term housing: http://www.sabbaticalhomes.com/,
and www.vrbo.com.
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. Yale also offers
pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships to people in our field. 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 Columbia-based Council for European
Studies publishes a Guide
to Grants and Fellowships for Europeanists (2012; click into the link at the bottom of
the page; UCLA is a subscriber, so you
can consult the guide online).
UCLA has a “Graduate and
Postdoctoral Extramural Support” search engine (called “GRAPES”) that you
might want to look at;
that link also has links to three other databases run by other
institutions that can be used by UCLA students. 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,
2008). You might also want to check out the funding page on
the H-Net website. SHAFR (the
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations) also has a page on its
website listing funding
opportunities; see also the SHAFR webpage on fellowships and
grants. The MIT Center
for International Studies has an online database you might
want to look at if you're applying for fellowships. The University of California’s
Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, based at UCSD, “maintains a searchable database
of more than 400 fellowships, grants, internships, prizes, and other funding
opportunities” for people in our field.
You can also sign up for the “IGCC Campus Email Alert” on that website; and the IGCC has
two programs of its own offering dissertation-year
fellowships to students from any of the campuses in the UC system. 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
SSRC has a guide
to writing grant proposals which you might find useful. In this
connection, see also the Berkeley Institute of International Studies Dissertation Proposal
Workshop webpage.
It also pays to keep your eyes open for things that don’t always turn up
in these lists. 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. The Marshall/Baruch
fellowship program might also be worth looking into. Note also a program run by NYU’s Tamiment
Library: Center
for the United States and the Cold War Fellowships and travel grants and the
Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship for 2012-2013, and the Mellon Pre-doctoral
Fellowship in Cold War/Post-1945 International History (bottom of page). Note also the Dartmouth
Post-doctoral Fellows Program in U.S. Foreign Policy and International
Security.
Note also the general guide put out by Women in International Security: Fellowships
in International Affairs: A Guide to Opportunities in the United States and
Abroad (1994). That guide has some advice about how to write a proposal,
and gives references to other useful publications in this area. WIIS also has a good website; the “jobs hotline” posted
there has info on fellowships and internships as well as jobs. If you’re interested in getting an
internship in this area, you might want to check out one or more of the
following:
Women in International Security, Internships in Foreign and Defense
Policy: A Complete Guide for Women (& Men) (Cabin John,
MD: Seven Locks Press, 1990) (SRLF)
Bruce Seymore and Matthew Higham, eds., The ACCESS Guide to International Affairs Internships: Washington, DC
(Washington: Access, 1996) (SRLF)
Stephen E. Frantzich, Studying in Washington: A Guide to Academic Internships in the
Nation’s Capital (Washington,
D.C.: American Political
Science Association, c2002)
Jeff Parness, The
Complete Guide to Washington Internships (Halbrook, MA: Bob
Adams, Inc., c1990).
Directory
of International Internships (East
Lansing, Mich.: Office of Overseas Study, Office of International Students and Scholars and Placement
Services at Michigan State University, 1987- )
James Muldoon, ed., Internships and Careers in International
Affairs (New York, N.Y.: United
Nations Association of the USA, c1994)
(SRLF)
Maria Pinto Carland and Candace Faber, eds., Careers in International
Affairs [electronic resource] (Washington,
D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, c2008) (revised periodically).
State Department internship
program
CIA
internships
Council
on Foreign Relations internship program
Atlantic Council
internships
Global
Affairs Internships and Careers Resource Directory (NYU)
Penn
guide to international internships
Federal Government internships and non-profit
internships (Indiana University REEI lists)
International
affairs jobs (general)
Internship
(and general job search) resources (SAIS)
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