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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: July 2026 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 of the book, and I want to show you how to go about identifying other sources related to your topic. I intend to update this appendix periodically, but my UCLA website, which now hosts it, will probably eventually disappear. In that case, the final version should still be available on the Internet Archive website, archive.org. Just search there for the present URL (http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/methbk/AppendixII.html). 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: either online, or (in the case of some older materials) on microfilm or microfiche. After that, I'll give some information about archival sources, and then I'll talk about various open sources. 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. The call numbers given here are for the versions in the UCLA Library, but they might also work for other libraries using the Library of Congress classification system. Contents of Appendix II: I. Published collections of documents US Declassified Documents Online Digital National Security Archive; National Security Archive Cold War International History Project Defense Department FOIA release list III. Microfilm and Microfiche sources UPA (JCS papers; NSC papers) (UPA is now part of ProQuest) US National Archives; National Archives publications of German documents Manuscript sources (both U.S. and non-U.S.) Doing research at the U.S. National Archives VI. Getting to see classified material (and other misc. matters) VII. Some Practical Information (copying documents, housing, funding) 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] Basic FRUS website (with links to online versions of FRUS volumes from the Lincoln administration onward; keyword searchable). Status of the series (publication schedule; also indicates which volumes have been published over the past year or so) British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914 (11 volumes) *D505 .G79b A number of volumes are available online through the Hathi Trust Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939 (65 volumes) DA566.7 .G79d. Two volumes, dealing with the immediate origins of the war of 1939, are available on the Internet Archive website: Series 3, vol. 6, and Series 3, vol. 7 Documents on British Policy Overseas (for post-1945 period; 15 volumes so far) (DA588 .D63 1984) All three
series of British diplomatic documents are also available
online from ProQuest through subscribing libraries. British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print (privately published, now by ProQuest; 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 this collection, but each series is given a different call number. Much of this material is also available online on the Adam Matthew website. Some volumes are also available on the Internet Archive. Documents diplomatiques français (various series, covering from 1871 through the 1960s). List by collection; list on the publisher's website. 1871-1914 collection: *D397 .F84d plus SRLF. Many volumes in this collection are available online through Gallica. To find a particular volume use the advanced Google search engine, limiting your search to the Gallica website (https://gallica.bnf.fr/). 1932-39 collection: DC396 .A5 1963 1954- collection; UCLA Library has volumes for 1966 on: JX603 A35 (not included in library catalog) Full list of published German diplomatic documents (from German Foreign Office website, Wayback Machine copy; with links to digitized versions of some materials) Die grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871-1914 (40 volumes in 54) SRLF About thirty volumes are available online through the Internet Archive). A partial French translation is also available: La Politique extérieure de l'Allemagne, 1870-1914 (32 volumes). (D394 G31p--not included in UCLA library catalogue) Karl Kautsky et al., Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch 1914 (Internet Archive). The English translation is available online through subscribing libraries in the Artemis Primary Sources collection The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600-1926 (link). Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, 1918-1945 (62 volumes in 5 series; all volumes available online through Bavarian State Library website). JX691 .A5 1949G; Law KZ691 .A5 1949 Two 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 on the Internet Archive website. All have links to pdf copies of the original volumes: Akten der Reichskanzlei: Weimarer Republik (1919-1933) Akten zur auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (covers the period from 1949 to 1953, and then from 1961 on (currently through 1995). Volumes covering 1954 through 1960 will eventually be published. Most volumes are available online either through the Institut für Zeitgeschichte website or through the publisher's website. Kabinettsprotokolle der Bundesregierung (1949-94 available online as of August 2026) 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). A number of volumes are available through the German Digital Library website. 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). Many other governments—Australia, Canada, Japan, Italy, and Belgium to name just a few—also publish collections of documents. The Documents on Australian Foreign Policy; the Documents on Canadian External Relations; the Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy; and the Documenti Diplomatici Italiani are all available online. A list of those collections (with links) has been posted on the internet. And you sometimes stumble across important collections of material relating to particular historical episodes as you do ordinary historical work. Galen Jackson and I, for example, came across some important new Israeli material when we were writing our article on the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. That material is discussed in an online appendix to our paper on that episode. 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. II. Online
Sources
A vast amount of very valuable material is available online, so much so (and so easy to use) that you can often do serious historical research without ever leaving your home or office. To get some sense for what is available that way, you might want to take a look at the section on digital collections in the Harvard Library’s Guide to History. 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 US Declassified Documents Online (subscription required; published by Gale; formerly called 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. When documents get declassified, some of the more important ones get posted on this site. These documents used to be published on microfiche, but are now available online, but only through libraries that subscribe to this service. You can do keyword, title, and subject searches, and you can also search for words found in the text of the document itself. You can then limit the search in various ways—by date of issue, classification level, and so on. 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 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, on the ProQuest site; subscription required], 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 currently (August 2026) includes about 68 collections, each focused on a particular topic. To see what they are, go into the main DNSA webpage and under "Included databases," click "show all" at the bottom. Note that some of these collections are linked to certain projects conducted under the auspices of the National Security Archive itself. The collection on U.S.-Japanese relations, for example, was connected to the National Security Archive’s U.S.-Japan project. That project, incidentally, has its own website, which contains the text of various working papers and oral history transcripts. The DNSA search page is very easy to use. You can search by collection or search in all collections at the same time. You can limit the search by date, by level or classification, and in various other ways. Subject terms corresponding to a particular document are noted in the listing for that document, and those terms 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. 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. (legacy site; new site). This material is to be found mainly in 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). But there are other documents posted there not found in those briefing books. See, for example, their webpage on the Carter-Brezhnev Project, which includes a number of briefing books containing documents that were assembled in conjunction with various conferences that project organized. 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 (later called the Wilson Center's) Digital Archive is composed of a series of collections of documents, often translated from Russian, east European, or Asian Communist original texts. Although no longer maintained, it is still available on the Internet Archive. Many of the documents in the Digital Archive 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). There are many other sources of online material for people in our field. 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) (archived version). Many documents have been digitized and posted on this website. 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 interviews done for the CSIS's US-UK Nuclear History Project and the Brookings/CISSM NSC project oral history collection (listed at the bottom of the page). Note also the interviews done in conjunction with the television series War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, and posted online (with synchronized transcripts) on WGBH's Open Vault. A number of important collections dealing with international
relations are available online through subscribing libraries from Adam Matthew Digital , especially in
their AM
Archives Direct collection. Note,
for example, the four collections there of material from the Confidential
Print (discussed above), and the six collections of files from the British
Foreign Office for various regions (China, Southeast Asia, Japan, the Middle
East, etc.). Two other collections are
of particular interest: The Nixon Years, 1969-1974 (key collections from the British National Archives at Kew) Macmillan Cabinet Papers, 1957-1963 The ProQuest History Vault has a large number of collections of interest to people in our field available online. To see what they have, click into that link and in the subject field select “International Relations and Military Conflicts” from the drop-down menu. They have many collections drawn from U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office archives, National Security Council [NSC] meetings and documents, the National Security Files for the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford administrations, JCS materials, to mention just a few. 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 collection is a digitzed version of the original microfilm publication, which included a number of supplements. These two collections should be used in conjunction with each other. If you want to use this source, one good way is to start with the very good hard-copy 721-page cumulative index to both collections: the Index to Documents of the National Security Council. This covers the material through the first supplement of the Minutes of Meetings and the fourth supplement of the Documents. This is quite a chunk: some of this material was produced during the Reagan period. There's another way to get access to the NSC material. First, you can identify specific documents and meetings using a number of lists that are available. 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. Using those lists to identify materials, you could then use the U.S. Declassified Documents Online website to search for a copies of the documents you're interested in. 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. Gale is another major publisher of primary source material which you should know about. The US Declassified Documents Online collection, discussed above, is now published under their sponsorship. Gale’s Archives Unbound section currently (August 2026) includes 122 collections, many directly focused on foreign affairs. 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 discussing their websites below in the section on archives—have made a lot of material available online. For example, at the Kennedy Library website you can see practically all the NSAMs—the National Security Action Memoranda—for the Kennedy period. 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 Library Digital Collections webpage. This includes 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 500,000 documents released by that agency (as of July 2026) in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or in other ways. Special collections are listed here; the listings have links to to the collections themselves, all of which are accessible online. This search engine was improved substantially in 2013, but you still have to search for documents by seeing which ones contain 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--but those words or phrases need to be chosen in a way that does not generate too many useless hits. (If, for example, you did a search in their Kissinger telephone transcripts collection for the word "Kissinger," of the 4669 documents in that collection (as of July 2014), you'd get hits for only 3669 of them--the reason being that Kissinger is sometimes referred to only as "Secretary.") You can't limit the search by level of classification, nature of document, or anything like that. On the other hand, you can use wildcards, Boolean connectors, and so on when you're doing a search. (See the page on search tips in the ERR.) You can get a lot from this search engine. One technique is based on the fact that you can now search by case number--that is, the number assigned when a particular FOIA request is originally submitted. This means, first of all, is that when you identify a document of interest, you can often see what other documents were released as a result of the same FOIA request just by clicking the link for the case number given next to the document. Not just that--you can also go into the FOIA logs for 2005 on, now posted on the website, to see who filed that request. Once you've identified the requester, you can see if that person has filed other requests dealing with this or a related subject. (Your assumption here would be that that requester was interested in a particular subject, and that it's quite possible he or she had filed other FOIA requests for material related to that subject.) You can locate file numbers for those other FOIA requests by searching for that person's name in the FOIA logs (they're keyword searchable). Once you identify those other case numbers, you can search for them in the main search engine (select “advanced search”; there’s a field there for case number). If you use this technique, there are a couple of other things you should know. First, when you do identify particular case numbers, you have to enter them in the main search engine in the proper format. The case number may be given on the logs as "200601579," but if you type that in, you'll get nothing. You have to type it in as "F-2006-01579" (without the quotation marks) to get hits. The second thing is that if you want to avoid having to go through all the logs, you can go into the Google advanced search engine and search for that requester's last name, limiting your search (in the "site or domain" field) to http://foia.state.gov. Then, in the pdf's that are generated by that search, do a Ctrl F search for the requester's name. You can use the same technique to identify cases dealing with a particular subject (e.g., "Arab-Israeli") or person (e.g., "Kissinger"). Note also that a major collection of State Department material from 1973-79 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 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" webpage, which you get into by clicking the search button for one of the files listed on the AAD homepage. 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." The online CIA collections are also quite important. The CIA Freedom of Information website—the Agency's Electronic Reading Room—was, in fact, improved dramatically in January 2017. It is now possible to use that website to read and download a very large number of documents in pdf format. But the search engine itself is a little hard to use. You have to grope in the dark for keywords. What that means is that the "Historical Collections" included in this website—there are about thirty of them—are of particular importance. How do you find them? You could begin by checking out the list of collections on the CIA's FOIA website; note also the webpage for other special collections. A collection of the President's Daily Briefs is also available on that site. A number of historical collections are related to books and monographs published by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (list with links to texts; see discussion below). The most important collections 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. There are three other collections that you should know about. They're not included in the list of "Historical Collections" noted above, but the CIA FOIA office has placed lists of documents included in these collections on its website: Declassified National Intelligence Estimates on the Soviet Union and International Communism Declassified
Intelligence Estimates on Selected Free World Countries Those lists are important, because knowing the titles of particular documents allows you to look them up in the Electronic Reading Room. In many cases, this allows you to view and download pdf copies of those documents. And even if a particular document is not in the ERR, you still may be able to find a copy using the U.S. Declassified Documents Online search engine or the DNSA website. Some additional documents have also been made available by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. The online version of CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991, for example, a publication the CSI put out in 2001, contains 49 important documents. Finally, if you're interested in the early 1960s, there is a list of National Intelligence Estimates [NIE's] (and the often more important Special National Intelligence Estimates [SNIE's]) produced from January 1960 through May 1962 that the NSC staff considered "still generally useful" by clicking here. That list might also help you search for particular documents. Many articles from the CIA's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence have been posted online. The issues are available on the CSI's Studies webpage, but the indices are no longer posted there; the old author-title index and operations-subject index (both with direct links to the articles listed) are, however, available through the Wayback Machine. Neither index, however, provides a full listing of all the declassified articles from this journal. For a list of that sort from 2017, click here. To find articles in that latter list not available in either of the other indices, you have to search for it in the CIA's Electronic Reading Room. But this doesn’t always work. For example, an article called "Deciphering Soviet Military Doctrine" by G. Murphy Donovan, which appeared in the Summer 1985 issue, is listed in that latter index but not in the other two. When I did a search for that title, the only thing that turned up is a table of contents for that issue, so if I had wanted to get it I would have had to put in FOIA request for it--but since it had already been declassified, in theory it wouldn't have taken too long to get. But what about the great mass of declassified CIA material (over 11 million pages as of August 2026) that is now available online through the CREST ("CIA Records Search Tool) system? How do you go about figuring out which of those documents is worth reading? There is now an advanced search option (a guide is available online) that allows you, in principle, to search by case number; a "case number" is given whenever a FOIA request is filed. But when you do identify documents of interest, the case number is, in my experience at least, rarely if ever listed—even though there is a line in each listing for "case number." I thought that the work-around would be to locate lists of case numbers online, and there are in fact a number of such lists that have been posted on the internet (themselves released as a result of FOIA requests). But when you copy those case numbers into the appropriate box on the CIA's FOIA website, nothing ever seems to turn up. Try it yourself: case logs for 2005-2007; 2009 log; 2010 log; 2011 log. The CIA FOIA website certainly doesn't tell you how to find case numbers that would work in a search, and does not even include a phone number or email address which you could use to contact them to get some kind of help. Another way to proceed--although in my experience this is not terribly productive--is to "unpack" the ESDN associated with a particular document that relates to what you're interested in which you found on the basic CIA FOIA website. The ESDN ("Executive Standard Document Numbers") is the particular identifying number assigned to each document. It is included in the listing for that document on that website. 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 information 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). Now, go into the basic CIA Electronic Reading Room and click "advanced search." If you want to see all the documents in the "job" you identified, put the job number, preceded and followed by an asterisk (in this case: *79T00975A*), in the ESDN field in that search window, and click "search." A number of other documents included in that job will then appear, and if you're lucky they may relate directly to the subject you're interested in. If you're just interested in seeing what else is in the same box, do the same thing, but this time also include the box number: *79T00975A0029* Or to narrow it down still further, you could limit your search to the file: *79T00975A00290009* Certain documents released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act are also available online in the DoD's FOIA Reading Room. Click the link at the bottom for lists of documents. The lists are not particularly helpful. When you click into the list for "International Security Affairs," for example, you'll notice that many of the documents don't even have names. So the documents are no longer as accessible as they were under the old system, where documents were listed under headings (e.g., "China," "Germany," "Coalition Provisional Authority," etc.) within various categories. But now, aside from the lists, your only option is to do a keyword search and then hope for the best. One partial solution is to use the list of declassified DoD documents (from 2002) which I downloaded a number of years ago. I say "partial" because only a relatively small portion of the declassified documents currently available on the website are on that list (about 1000 out of 6000). If, however, 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. An alternative is to search for that title on Google, limiting the search to file type "pdf." Finally, if this source is important to you, you might want to put in a FOIA request for an up-to-date list of declassified documents, which almost certainly already exists. In 2012, the National Archives also set up a special webpage for declassified material: NARA and Declassification. The links for the National Declassification Center, the presidential libraries (including information about the Remote Archives Capture [RAC] system for processing CIA material); and the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel [ISCAP], are of particular interest to people in our field. The section on ISCAP Release Decisions has links to documents released as the result of appeals to this inter-agency panel, many of which are of fundamental importance. You can often learn a lot by comparing "sanitized" versions of a document with fuller versions, including those released following an appeal to ISCAP. Those older versions can often be found on the U.S. Declassified Documents Online website, or even by doing a Google Search for a relatively innocuous phrase from a document you find on ISCAP. Compare, for example, the record of a December 1973 meeting between Kissinger and Schlesinger released by ISCAP in 2012 (link) with an earlier version of the same document, declassified in 2010, and available on the Ford Library website (link). I discussed this method on pp. 159-62 of the book, but for more information see my webpage on "declassification analysis"; note also the supplement I added in 2013. One can also find interesting material on some hard-to-use websites maintained by other government agencies—for example, the Department of Energy's OpenNet. An ordinary search on that website for "Seaborg Diary" yielded over 4000 hits. (If you use the advanced search, be sure to put the search term in the title and not the "full text" field.) Various other collections of official material can be found online. Note especially the collections of Cabinet Papers on the British National Archives website; over a thousand “pieces” (i.e., file folders, boxes, or volumes), covering the period through 1995, are currently (August 2026) available for free download. The earliest material in that collection posted online is from 1880. Some other important material has been made available online, for example the Eden papers (1935-46). In its Digital Microfilm project, the BNA has digitized parts of some important microfilm collections, such as the records of the Committee of Imperial Defense, and made that material available for free download. That link provides you with a useful guide to finding freely downloadable files. The British National Archives’ digital holdings are especially worth checking out if you're working on a study of events that took place about thirty years earlier. If this applies to you, be sure to check out their latest releases page. Thus, for example, at the end of 2016 the following announcement was posted on the BNA's news webpage: "Prime Minister's papers from 1989 and 1990 released." (Note also this other page on that collection.) As that announcement noted, "the world was surprised" during the 1989-90 period "by the sudden collapse of communism in Europe, encapsulated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent German reunification," and it went on to give links to the listings for a number of key files: PREM 19/2696, PREM 19/2697, PREM 19/2999, PREM 19/3000, PREM 19/3002, PREM 19/3004, PREM 19/3007. When you click into those listings, you'll see that pdf copies of all but one of those files are available for immediate (and easy) download. Just click "add to basket," then "continue to basket," and then "checkout." The files, however, are not keyword searchable, so if you want to zero in on a particular issue it might make sense to ocr them first so you can do keyword searches; as you probably know, there’s a version of Acrobat that allows you to do this. Other countries have also started putting material of this sort on the internet. The Bundesarchiv has put the German Cabinet protocols (1949-98 as of August 2026) on its website. The Bundesarchiv also posted on its website a number of documents from the Chancellor's Office dealing with the reunification of Germany in 1989-90; those documents were drawn from the special edition of the Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik dealing with those events that was published in 1998. A number of documents relating to this issue drawn mainly from the Foreign Office's Political Archive were also available on the Institut für Zeitgeschichte website; this collection (now available on the Internet Archive website) is a supplement to Horst Möller et al., eds., Die Einheit: Das Auswärtige Amt, das DDR-Außenministerium und der Zwei-plus-Vier-Prozess (2015). For a page listing the Bundesarchiv's digitized collections, some of which are accessible online, click here; note also the Bundesarchiv's invenio website, which gives you direct access to a great mass of archival material. 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. intelligence agencies. The National Security Agency has posted various collections of material on its website. For a list, and links to the collections themselves, click here. There are collections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Venona, and so on, as well as a whole series of cryptologic histories. 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 (containing "7 million pages of scanned material" as of February 2019). There are also various sources available online that provide statistical data on important issues. For nuclear stockpile figures, see, for example, the Johnston Archive. Three volumes of the Nuclear Weapons Databook are linked to the Thomas Cochran bibliography and archive. Note also the ongoing Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Notebook. III. Microfilm
and Microfiche Material
You may think that with so much material available online, and with so many of the sources originally published in older formats now having been digitized, you don’t have to pay much attention to that older material. But a vast amount of material on microfilm and microfiche has not been digitized, and you can usually get access to it even if your home library doesn't own those collections. To order them through interlibrary loan, first request the finding aids—they're generally published as supplements to the original microform publications—and then request specific reels or fiche. You can locate those guides and collections and make your interlibrary loan request by using WorldCat, which you can usually get access to through a basic university library catalog, like the UCLA library catalog. How do you identify material of this sort you might be interested in? For a general guide to sources of this sort, check out the section in the section in the Harvard Library’s Research Guide for Finding Manuscripts and Archival Collections on Microfilmed Manuscripts and Archival Collections. You could also take a look at Frank Conaway, comp., “Guide to Microform and CD-Rom Sources for History and Political Science in the University of Chicago Library” and at “Major Microform Collections in the Combined Arms Research Library” to see which collections you might want to look at. You could then search for the titles in WorldCat; it will not be hard to see if they have already been digitized. The other way to identify microform sources is to take advantage of the fact that sources of this sort have been 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 can just go through the catalogues and websites describing these products one by one. University
Publications of America (now part of ProQuest) is the first firm you should
know about. The old UPA list no longer seems to be available on the ProQuest
website, but you can still view it on the Wayback Machine. That will allow
you to see the old list of UPA's
microfilm collections in International Studies. On that list,
you'll see about twelve subheadings—including International
Relations and European
Studies (links also to Wayback Machine versions). Once you've
identified the collections you're interested in, you can search for them in a
library catalog. These collections all
have user guides, often filed with the microfilm itself. To find others do a Google search for
"user guide" plus the name of the collection you're interested in.
But note that ProQuest is currently (2026) digitizing these microfilm
collections and including them in its History Vault
for online access (through subscribing libraries). If you work with the
Joint Chiefs of Staff material, you might want to use it in conjunction with
the various histories that JCS historians have produced. The series on The
Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy is particularly important.
Twelve volumes in that series, covering the period from 1945 to 1980, are available
online. That link also lists various other works available online produced
by JCS History Office: works relating to Vietnam, World War II conferences,
and several topical issues. Various other JCS histories have been
declassified and are available in the archives or online. The JCS
"History of the Indochina Incident," for example, I
found to be of particular value: it summarized documents that were considered
too sensitive to declassify and include in the regular boxes of JCS papers
that were made available to the public. Such histories are particularly
useful if you're doing archival work, because their footnotes tell you what
the richest files are. A number of other JCS histories exist but have not
been declassified, and there are formerly classified versions of some of the
JCS histories that have been published. (For a partial list, click here.)
If you find out about something of interest, you can of course ask to see it
under the Freedom of Information Act, which I'll be talking about at the end
of this appendix. 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 that link, a list of all their collections turns up. You can then narrow it down by subject area. 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 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--look under S for “Sir”; and Churchill at War). Online guides are linked to the lists on the Gale Primary Sources - Media Guide webpage. Here are some other collections listed there (links to the guides are included on that website): Papers of Henry Lewis Stimson, 1867-1950 Diaries of Henry Lewis Stimson, 1909-1945 George W. Ball Papers Gerald R. Ford and Foreign Affairs: Part 1: National Security Advisor's Files, Section 1: Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific Part 1: National Security Advisor's Files, Section 2: Presidential Correspondence and Conversations with Foreign Leaders Jimmy Carter and Foreign Affairs: Part 1: White House Central Files, Section 1: Foreign Affairs Subject File George H. W. Bush and Foreign Affairs 1989-1993: Part 1: The Moscow Summit and the Dissolution of the USSR Part 2: Bosnia and the Situation in the Former Yugoslavia Part 3: Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification of Germany Part 4: The Middle East Peace Conference Madrid, Spain Cyprus Crisis, 1967: The State Department's Crisis Files U.S. Relations with Panama and Operation Just Cause Documenting the Peruvian Insurrection Russian Archives: Cold War and Central Committee: Series 1: The International Department, 1953-1957 Series 2: The General Department of the Central Committee, 1953-1966 Series 3: Congresses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1955-1986 Series 4: Plenums of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1941-1990 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 briefly about microform materials put out under official auspices.
This means mainly the microfilm collections published by the U.S. National
Archives. There are other microform sources that could be mentioned in this
context. The major collections of diplomatic documents, for example, have
sometimes had microfiche supplements. But the FRUS microfiche supplements
have now been made into regular FRUS online volumes, and can accessed through
the regular FRUS website, cited above. Microfiche supplements have also been
published in conjunction with the Documents on British Policy Overseas. But
the U.S. National Archives is by far the most important official producer of
this sort of material. The National Archives periodically publishes a catalogue of their microfilm publications: National Archives Microfilm Publications for Research: A Comprehensive Catalog (Washington: NARA, 2000). There is also an online version of the National Archives microfilm catalog. If you use the online version, click "advanced search." You can limit the search to "diplomatic records" using the drop-down menu for "subject catalog" (849 hits). You can also search by subject term (e.g., "Japan") 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) Using the online catalogue, you can quickly see
which microfilm publications have been drawn from material in those last five
record groups. As for the State Department material in RG 59, if you don't
want to review the entire list of microfilm publications--and there are about
1100 of them--you could use the online catalogue, but conduct a more targeted
search. You could, for example, put the name of the country you're interested
in in the subject term field, put "59" in the record group field,
and then click the search button. A hard copy catalogue of microfilm
publications relating to foreign policy was published in 1986: United States,
National Archives and Records Administration, Diplomatic
Records: A Select Catalog of National Archives Microfilm
Publications (Washington: NARA, 1986) (REF Z6465.U5 N37 1986). Let me end this section with a word about RG 242. This is the record group for foreign material that fell into the hands of the American government. Some of the sources here are very rich. There are 249 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); and Manfred F. Boemeke and Roger Chickering, Guide to Archives and Historical Collections in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Part II: Research Resources in Modern German and Austrian History (Washington: GHI, 1995). There are also some Italian collections listed,
including collections of Mussolini and Ciano papers. There's a collection of Soviet
documents from the Smolensk archive—that material was the basis for Merle
Fainsod's famous book, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1958)—and even a collection of Grenada material. For
more information about these collections, check out the section on RG 242 in
the National Archives' online guide. Many important British materials are also available on microfilm. To find them, you can go into the UCLA library catalog, select Advanced Search, select WorldCat, select “subject” from the drop-down menu, type in something like “Great Britain Foreign relations Sources,” type in “microfilm” in the second search field, select “archival material” as the Material Type, and then click "search." 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. 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? One good place to start is the Library of Congress’s Research Guide on Databases and E-Resources for Manuscript Research. This describes, and has links to, a number of important databases you can use to find sources that interest you. The Harvard Library’s Research Guide for Finding Manuscripts and Archival Collections is also terrific. The discussion there about how to use WorldCat for this purpose (in the part of the guide called “Finding Collections in U.S. Repositories”) is very much worth reading. (Don’t forget that anyone can access WorldCat through the UCLA Library website.) You might also want to check out the finding aid for Archives and Manuscript Collection Databases US & Worldwide on the University of Chicago Library’s website. But you can also look at the guides put out by the most important official repositories. The published guides are updated periodically, and most of these repositories by now have also posted online versions of their guides on their websites. Those websites, moreover, provide you with all kinds of practical information—about when the archive is open, about what you have to do to get access to its collections, about research grants, and so on. In the United States, the presidential libraries and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, are the most important repositories for our purposes, although some of the military services have major repositories of their own: Guide to
Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States The most important thing to get from 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). The National Archives also has a research guide for the Cold War era.
Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York List of collections with links to online finding aids and digitized documents; the finding aids are keyword searchable. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri Truman Papers (many finding aids linked) Other collections of papers (also with links to many finding aids) Eisenhower Library, Abilene Kansas List of Finding Aids (with many links to the finding aids themselves) "Declassification at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library" (David Haight) Online documents (with links to annual releases of newly declassified documents) Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts Search Engine; finding aids (for 474 collections; search can be limited in various ways; detailed finding aids have links to available online material) National Security Files (finding aid) (partially digitized) President's Office Files (fully 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 also the material on the Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program website. Six volumes of transcripts have been published (as of February 2019). 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. Research page (with links to finding aids) Subject guides (NATO, Vietnam, nuclear weapons, etc.) LBJ phone conversations (index can be used in conjunction with the tapes on the Miller Center website). Much of this material has been published: The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson; a digital edition is also available. NSAMs (100% digitized); NSC meetings (100% digitized) LBJ and Foreign Affairs (microfilm, from Primary
Source Media): subject
file Much of this is now
available online in Gale’s “Archives Unbound” collection Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, California (from July 1, 2010) Guide to Holdings and Research Guides National Security Memoranda (with links to NSSMs and NSDMs) Nixon tapes (finding aid) Nixon tapes (online). Tapes and some transcripts are also available on the Miller Center's Presidential Recordings Programs's website and at Luke Nichter's Nixontapes.org website Richard Moss, "Flawed FRUS? Pitfalls with the Nixon Tapes and How to Avoid Them" For annual releases of newly declassified material (some documents can be viewed online), do a search in their website for "materials release." Edward Keefer, "Key Sources for Nixon's Foreign Policy" (SHAFR Newsletter, 2007) 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) Digital Collections-Foreign Affairs and National Security Memoranda of Presidential Conversations (includes late Nixon period) National Security Advisor's papers (microfilm, from Primary Source Media): part 1 (linked to guide); part 2 (presidential correspondence and conversations with foreign leaders) (look under “G” for “Gerald R. Ford”); digitized version is now available in Gale’s “Archives Unbound” collection. Carter Library, Atlanta, Georgia 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) (look under “J”); digitized version now available in Gale’s “Archives Unbound” collection. Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California A
collection of documents from this repository is available on the Reagan Files
website, put together by Jason Saltoun-Ebin, author of The Reagan Files George H.W. Bush Library, College Station, TX Digital Research
Room (for finding aids) Memcons/Telcons;
National Archive webpage has links for pdfs: Memcons Telcons
Clinton Library, Little Rock, Arkansas George W. Bush Library, Dallas, Texas Digitized
Records and Finding Aids Obama Presidential Library (fully digital) U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center (click “Archives”) Finding Aids (with list of collections) Air Force Historical Research Agency Numbered
historical studies (links to texts) Air Force Historical Support Division (click “AFHMP books”; that webpage provides links to full-text versions of the books listed there) Guide to Air Force Historical Literature, 1943-83 Naval History and Heritage Command Note also: Guide to United States Naval Administrative Histories of World War II (with links to full-text histories). The Hyperwar website has links to full-text versions of many official World War II military histories. Records of the Conflict
Records Research Center Captured records relating to Saddam's Iraq and Al Qaeda. The CRRC closed down in June 2015, but in October 2024 the Hoover Institution announced that it had acquired the collection and that this material would be available online at the Hoover’s reading rooms on the Stanford campus and at their Washington office. For more information on this collection, click here. A finding aid is available on the internet. In Britain, the most important repository is now 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 in older publications you still 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, and "DEFE" for the Ministry of Defence, are the most important ones for our purposes). Then, under "Browse," click into the corresponding letter, and then click into the code corresponding to the department you're interested in. Then click the tab for "Browse by Reference." On the page that turns up, you'll see a column on the right listing the "classes" that that collection is broken down into (like "FO 371," the political correspondence of the Foreign Office). When you click into the listing there for one of those classes, you'll see that it is broken down into what are called "pieces"—that is, boxes, bound volumes, or even file folders—which, like the classes themselves, are numbered consecutively, beginning with 1. You can also use the catalogue to search for a particular subject—for example, "nuclear planning group." Click here to find out how to order material in advance of your visit, and, if you already have a reader's ticket, how to put in a bulk order (for up to 50 pieces with successive piece numbers). Note also that you can use their search engine to search for material in “more than 2500 other archives.” There are many research guides linked to the catalogue's homepage. I should also note that the old PRO published a number of handbooks that are still 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 The online catalogue should give you most of the information you need, but in some cases you may want to consult a printed finding aid. Some of these were published in facsimile form by the List and Index Society and they're generally a little easier to use than the online guide. For a list of some of the more important ones, click here. And don’t forget that some of the collections covered here have been reproduced in microfilm collections (which themselves have often been digitized); those materials were discussed in an earlier section of this appendix. As I mentioned in the section above on online sources, the British National Archives has digitized a good deal of material. Many documents are, in fact, available for download through their website. For a list of digital microfilm collections, click here. FO 800 (papers of Foreign Secretaries), DEFE 3 (World War II decrypts), and various Cabinet Office files are of particular interest to people in our field. As noted above, Anthony Eden’s papers for 1935 to 1946 (FO 954) can also be viewed online. 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. At the Archives nationales, the most important collections for people in our field are the papers of the chiefs of state (AG) (archived older version) and the collections of private papers (AP) (archived older version). There are various guides that show which parts of that series deal with specific areas: papers of political figures (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 and are linked to their listings in some of the finding aids I just referred to. 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. There are also some published guides, which for certain projects might still be worth looking at: 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) You might also want to look at their Online Reading Room. Note also their general page describing their holdings (post-1789). 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 Many finding aids have been posted on the Archives diplomatiques website. The Service historique de la Défense has posted some finding aids on its website; click here and here. 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 WorldCat) 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. 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 a lso 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 Bundesarchiv has made some material from its East German collections available on its website. Note also their webpage on the East German archives (SAPMO). Finally, if you are doing work in this area, you might also want to check out the Germanic Research Web's page on manuscripts and archives. 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, they are often 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 repositories. In the United States, for example, many important collections can be found in the Library of Congress Manuscript Room. The LOC has a webpage that allows you to search for relevant collections (and for the finding aids you will need to use them). When you click “Collections” at the top, over 3000 of their collections are listed, about 2300 of which are in the Manuscript Division, which is the part of the Library that would have the collections you’re interested in. Expand the subject list on the left, and choose the subject you’re interested in. If you limit your search, for example, to “United States--Foreign relations--20th century,” you’ll get 69 hits; each listing will have a finding aid for that collection. 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.
Note especially the Mudd Library's webpage for selected
resources on Cold War history and their page listing their
collections on John
Foster Dulles. Many Mudd
Library collections relating to the Cold War (including the Dulles
collections) can be viewed online.
For a much fuller listing of archival collections, check out the Library of Congress’s “Search Across Archives” webpage. This lists a number of online databases that can be used to “explore archives around the world.” You can also use WorldCat to identify archival material. Anyone can get access to it by using the UCLA Library website. Just click “Advanced Search,” select “WorldCat Global Catalog,” and enter your search terms. Don’t forget you can do a subject search for a known subject term. Then select “Archival Material” from the drop-down “Material Type” menu. Some of the listings that turn up might be on microfilm, and if you home library doesn't own what you need, 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 for "Kissinger, Henry" on WorldCat 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 if you limit the search to "Archival Materials," 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 a particular individual on the National Archives website. That search will turn up listings not just at the National Archives but in many other repositories as well. Some research guides are also available online at this site. Those guides have descriptions of and direct links to the main repositories in a given area. 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. ArchiveSearch 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 also want to check out a couple of older 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 There's a similar guide for France, also 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 One particularly important repository is part of the Centre d'histoire at Sciences Po; for a list of their collections, click here. (To see the list, click the plus sign next to “Archives du politique.”) 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 (with some sources available online)
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. Note also the
Bundesarchiv's Central Database for Personal Papers
(Kalliope).
The Council for European Studies has a webpage with links to various European archives and libraries. There are various other gateway websites of this sort that you might find useful. You can, for example, browse by country name for archives around the world on the British National Archives website. If you're interested
in Russian material, be sure to check out the University of Chicago Library’s
guide
for Slavic Studies. The section on “finding
archives” has links to a number of databases, including the Archeo Biblio Base, “a guide to
finding and using archives in Russia.”
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 CWIHP working paper, “Archives of
Russia Seven Years After: ‘Purveyors of Sensations’ or ‘Shadows Cast to the
Past’?” (link).
See also Norman Naimark, "Cold War Studies and New Archival
Materials on Stalin," Russian Review 61, No. 1 (Jan., 2002). The
situation in this area is constantly changing, so your best bet is to talk
with some scholars who have worked in this area.
A massive amount of material from the Stalin period is available online at the Stalin Digital Archive website. A user guide to this collection is also available online. This is one of the collections listed in Soviet History: Archival Resources at Harvard University Library and Archives. This list “is intended as a companion to Soviet History: a Bibliographic Guide to Published Sources,” put out by the Harvard Library. The Miller Center has (or had) a project focusing on materials from the Khrushchev era. Finally, if you’re interested in doing work in this area, you might want to take a look at the National Security Archive webpage on “Connecting Past and Present through Archival Research on Russia.” 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. 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. For
the International Atomic Energy Agency, see Marko Miljković, “The
Researchers' Guide to the IAEE Archives” on the National Security
Archive website.
So 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. As was noted above, many finding aids are available online. Others are only available at the archive where the collection is stored. The archivists will tell you where they are and might even provide you with certain finding aids that are not on the open shelves. So 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, in fact, 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. I haven't been to the National Archives recently, so what I say here might be a little out of date. But if you've never been there and plan on doing research there, this discussion might still be of some value. 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 lower level. Then you go back up 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. 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 there. 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. 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—for a given pull 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. (This was the schedule the last time I was there, but you should check to see if the times have changed.) 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. Whichever room you got to 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. Indeed, even if you've been there before, you might want ot talk with an archivist if you're embarking on a new project. Let me talk first about the State Department materials, and especially about the finding aids in Room 2600; I'll talk about the finding aids in Room 2400 a little later. 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 National 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 does not really give you all the information you need. 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 these collections are so massive that even 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 photocopying. Actually, they're all available online nowadays, so you don't even have to use the hard copies, unless you're like me and prefer them to their online equivalents.) 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 or photograph the withdrawal card so you could put in a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] 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. Now let me talk about the subject-numeric part of the State Department central files, for documents from about February 1963 on. How do you find your way around the subject-numeric files? There is a short guide giving a rough explanation of this system, and again there are the references in FRUS, but your basic entrée here is the box list in the "State Department group" of finding aids in room 2600. The box list, however, gives only a fairly minimal idea of what each box contains, so you may have to grope around a bit. You order by box number. A typical order slip for the subject-numeric files is attached as a link. The lot files are
more difficult to use. There is a book by Gerald Haines describing the lot
files: Gerald Haines, A Reference Guide to United States Department of
State Special Files (Westport: Greenwood, 1985). CD3031 H35 1985 You can also often
find lists of relevant lot files at the beginning of various FRUS volumes.
Your main entrée into the lot files, however, will probably be the finding
aids in the "State Department group" in room 2600 (on the left
toward the back as you walk in). There are two looseleaf binders labeled
"Office Files/Lot Files." One lists what is available by office and
the other by entry number (also called MLR number). You'd then look for
finding aids for whatever collections you've identified in those binders by
consulting other binders in the "State Department group" of finding
aids in that room, binders labeled by either region or topic. When you go
through the finding aids in those binders, note the lot number, MLR number,
and brief title, the numbers (and something about the content) of the boxes you're
interested in, and above all, the location number for that lot file. The
location number is generally, but not always, written by hand into the
finding aid, and looks something like this: 250/D/15/06, or 250/62/23/5. When it's not written
in, you can find it by looking up the entry (or MLR) number in one of the
Master Location Register binders to the left of the door (as you're looking
from inside the finding aids room); three binders cover RG 59. (There's
another set in the glass-enclosed area off the main reading room.) Most
entries have a simple four-digit number—e.g., 5301 for NATO Affairs,
1959-1966—and are listed sequentially starting at the beginning of the first
of the three MLR binders; for those listings, "A1" appears just
above the entry number on the "Finding Aid" line. But if you're
interested in an entry number that begins with "UP"—for example,
UP-025, the Hillenbrand Papers—you'll have to go to the end of the A1 listings
and then through the UD listings until you see "UD-UP" on the
“Finding Aid” line. You might not be able
to locate finding aids for every lot file that interests you. If you can't
find a finding aid, be sure to consult one of the archivists who specializes
in that particular record group. He or she may be able to provide you with at
least a rudimentary box list for that collection. But if you can't get even
that, there's no need to give up. Don't forget that you can still order some
or all of the boxes in those collections, which is something in fact that you
might want to do, especially if there are relatively few boxes in the lot
file in question. Getting the location
number is very important, since you'll need it to fill out your order form.
You put it in the second through fifth boxes located right above the big
"record identification" box. If a particular collection extends
over a number of shelves or even compartments, you need only put the starting
location. (See the example
I put online.) You can also tell from the location number if the
collection is still classified (in which case you can't order it, but you can
put in a FOIA request for some or all of the material it contains—a form for
this purpose is available in the glass-enclosed area in the main reading
room). Files in stack area 631—that is, with a location number beginning with
631—fall in this category. Another important binder in the State Department Group of finding aids in Room 2600 is labeled "Conference Files." This collection contains the records of meetings held by U.S. officials on trips, mostly abroad. For example, if you order "Conference Files for 1964-66, CF 268-269, boxes 465-466," at 150/68/28/1-7, you'll get the records of the U.S. Balance of Payments Mission to Europe of January 1968. In the back of the Conference Files binder, you'll also see a list of materials under the heading "Executive Secretariat, Briefing Books, 1958-76." This contains some interesting material you might be surprised to find here. Boxes 3-9 in this collection, for example, contain a set of documents on U.S. relations with France, June 1958 through February 1963 (Lot 69D 150, 150/68/1/2-7). I should note more generally that there are often hidden treasures in RG 59, and it's often hard to know how to go about discovering them. One often just stumbles across them in the course of looking for 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 (or even just using their websites). 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. Now let me talk about the other main collection of finding aids—the ones relating to military sources available in Room 2400. The military sources 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, seven volumes of which, covering the 1947-1973 period, have
been published so far. All are available online: History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, gen. ed. Alfred Goldberg (Washington: OSD Historical Office, 1984- ). UA23.6 .H57 It makes sense to look at those volumes first, before you go to the archives. The Defense Department has also posted on its website a series of oral history transcripts of interviews with top Pentagon officials (link). There are also webpages for various strategy documents (link to national security documents; link to defense strategy documents; link to military strategy documents). The footnotes in the OSD histories might help you find your way around RG 330. 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? Until recently (August 2026), this is how you had to proceed. 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? But there is now an easier way to access this material. A group at the Adams Center for Military History at VMI has developed a quite extraordinary AI-based project (called the Secretaries of Defense Records Research Assistant) that makes it possible to use RG 330 much more effectively. 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 are searchable electronically through Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic; coverage varies by periodical). This is particular useful if you are working on a relatively recent topic. If you are using sources published in a language you cannot read, the translate function here is easy to use and is quite good. Note also a guide put out by the Columbia library giving information about various major U.S. newspapers available online (with dates of coverage). Three important newspapers--the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal--can also be searched via another subscription database, ProQuest Newspapers. Click into that link, and then, under "databases," click "deselect all" and then select the particular newspapers you want to search in. 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. ProQuest’s Newsweek Archive (1933-2012) might also be worth checking out. The Times of London (1785-2024 as of August 2026) is available on the Gale website. The ProQuest and Nexis Uni 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 are still worth consulting. 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 on). 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 used to be the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature (REF AI3 R22), but that guide is no longer published. You might be able to get access to an electronic search engine, the Readers' Guide Retrospective, covering 1890-1982, by looking up that title in your library Catalog. 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. Some non-English-language publications publish English-language editions. Der Spiegel, for example, has an English language edition available online. But even if a given publication doesn’t publish an English-language version, it’s easy to translate the text into a language you can read by using the translate icon on your browser. 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 1941 through 1996. The reports themselves are available online through Readex. 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 ProQuest
Congressional webpage is a good place to start. You can use this
search engine to search various Congressional sources (e.g., hearings,
reports, documents, etc.), and particular searches can be fine-tuned in
various ways. You can, for example, limit your search to hearings and search
for the testimony of a particular "witness." The listings that turn
up often have a pdf icon that allows you to download a particular item. If
you want a browsable index, at least as a supplement, you might want to take
a look at pages for Congressional hearings,
reports, and documents, from 1961 on, in the U.S. Government Publishing
Office website. You can also browse by
Congressional committee. Those documents are all available online
in pdf format. And if you're interested in the military
issues for the early Cold War period, there's one guide you might find
particularly useful: Congressional Hearings on American Defense Policy 1947-1971: An Annotated Bibliography, comp. Richard Burt (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974). SRLF The important series Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series) (20 vols., covering 1947-68, and published years later) is available online. (To see what’s available, after you click that link, copy and paste the title of the series into the search field, and click "search.") 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 websites: current administration; archived websites for G.W. Bush administration; Obama administration 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 GovInfo 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)
State Department material (earlier administrations): State Department website (Clinton period) State Department website (G.W. Bush period, 2001-2009) State Department website (Obama period) Snapshots of state.gov starting in December 1996 are available in the Library of Congress Web Archives Collection 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 (for older material). For speeches, transcripts, and so on, click the tab for "newsroom" and select the appropriate category. Note that this source is not 100% reliable. 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 (go into the tab for "press room") and the German Foreign Office website, for example, both have English-language versions. 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. In the United States, for example, 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. Incidentally, if you're working with Congressional materials, there are also a number of published research guides you should know about: Guide to the Records of the United States Senate at the National Archives, 1789-1989. Bicentennial ed. ed. U.S. Senate Bicentennial Publication. Washington: U.S. Senate, 1989. Paul, Karen Dawley. Guide to Research Collections of Former United States Senators, 1789-1995 : A Listing of Archival Repositories Housing the Papers of Former Senators, Related Collections, and Oral History Interviews Senate Document. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1995. CD3043 .G85 1995 Guide to the Records of the United States House of Representatives at the National Archives, 1789-1989. Bicentennial ed. ed. Document. Washington, D.C.: U.S. House of Representatives, 1989. A Guide to Research Collections of Former Members of the United States House of Representatives, 1789-1987. Bicentennial ed. ed. House Document / 100th Congress, Second Session. Washington DC: The Office, 1988. CD3043 .G84 1988 Research, Carl Albert Congressional and Studies Center Congressional Archives. A Guide to the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives. [Norman, Okla.]: The Center, 1995. CD3042 .C37 1995 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 sheets online--one that's "clean" and another that's been through the mill--so you can see what they're like. 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. You'll note that some requests for material in the McNamara Papers made in 2004 had not been closed as of 2010. 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, although a number of agencies now allow you to file a FOIA request electronically. The National Security Archive provides a lot of guidance on its FOIA webpage, and has a detailed pdf guide (with sample letters) for you to download. 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; detailed information about the State Department's FOIA process is available on that site. The DoS allows you to submit your request electronically. The Defense Department FOIA office also allows you to submit FOIA requests electronically and a sample request letter can be found on its website. The procedure for making a FOIA request for still-classified material at the National Archives is outlined on their website. But I haven’t had much luck with that process. For example, I submitted a request form in 2005 (using the procedure then in place), and as of 2026 I still haven’t heard back from them. 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: they base their requests on the SF-135 forms submitted when a document is transferred from a creating agency to a storing agency. If you're doing this kind of work, you might want to take a look at James David, Conducting Post-World War II National Security Research in Executive Branch Records: A Comprehensive Guide (Westport: Greenwood, 2001); note also William Burr's review of this book in the Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 6, no. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 128-30. When you file a FOIA request, 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 often does, take years before you get anything in the mail—if ever. You’re occasionally able to access still-classified material in a different way. You can, for example, apply for a security clearance to see series 1 in the Dulles State Department records at the Mudd Library at Princeton. At one point, the Air Force had a program (called “Limited Security Access”) that enabled researchers to look at older material up to the grade of secret; the researcher’s notes then had to be submitted for declassification review, and that could take months. Still, I was able to use that program to go through a lot of material in the Rand Corporation archives in Santa Monica; Rand was under contract to the Air Force in the period I was interested in, so the clearance covered the work I wanted to do. And I got a lot of terrific material that way. That program has since been discontinued, but the point is that programs of this sort do come and go, so you should keep your eyes open. VII. Some
Practical Information What do you do when you go to an archive and start going through the boxes you’ve ordered? In the old days, you’d have to read the material in the files they contain with some care, and you’d take handwritten notes to identify the documents and transcribe the passages you find there (which you might later want to quote in something you write). This was the way I did my own dissertation research in 1971. Needless to say, this was very time consuming. But things got a lot better when photocopying became relatively inexpensive. I remember buying my own little xerox machine and carrying it around to the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries in 1989. I didn’t have to read the material I was going through very carefully, because it was easy to make photocopies and then go through it (and mark it up) when I got home. It eventually became possible to take digital photographs of the documents that were of interest, first with a regular camera (on a tripod or camera stand) and then even with a cellphone. I eventually bought a document camera—Ipevo’s Ziggi HD-Plus—which I love and still use when the archives allow it (which is not always the case). With this new technology, I can go through the material I order very quickly; the real reading will take place when I return home and print out, go through, and mark up the material I photographed. One key thing, when you’re working this way, is to make sure that you have whatever information you need if you ever want to use the material you’re copying in something you write. The easiest way to do that is to have a sheet with the citation information (box, file, series, and maybe collection and repository). That sheet could be copied before you start photographing the documents in that file. You could also make sure that the necessary citation information becomes part of the photograph by putting it at the bottom of a piece of paper that you place underneath the page you’re photographing, but making sure that the citation information sticks out from below the document and becomes part of the photograph. The photographed documents can be saved as pdf files—the Ziggi camera makes this very easy—and the pdf’s can then be made machine readable, by using an optical character recognition (ocr) program, like Adobe Acrobat Pro. If you don’t have access to something of the sort, by the way, I think it’s very much worth buying. But you can’t use that technique in every archive. Sometimes you’re not allowed to make photocopies at all and you still have to take notes by hand. (This was my experience with the Pompidou papers at the Archives Nationales in Paris.) Lighting can also be a problem. In general, it’s important to learn the rules about copying before you arrive at an archive—about what sorts of systems are permitted, about lighting, 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 is so that anyone checking the material could see that it has already been declassified. If an archive does not want people to use the photocopies in a publication, but thinks it's okay to allow researchers to make photocopies for their personal use, they'll simply make sure you don't use a high-quality reproduction system; one place I visited that had this concern was very happy when I made copies with the camera on my cellphone—and the photos came out surprisingly well. So you’ll eventually accumulate a substantial collection of documents. Make sure you save backups as you accumulate them, both on your computer (or flashdrive) and on the cloud. But be careful about GoogleDrive; accounts can disappear if they’re not used for a certain period of time. And put some thought into how you’d like to organize the material you’re collecting. Some people think it’s a good idea to keep a research diary to keep track of which materials you’ve already seen. Maybe so, but I personally have never done so and I haven’t found that much of a problem. There are some other practical matters that you may need to concern yourself with. Housing: Although you no longer have to spend nearly as much time away from home as you used to, you may want to travel to at least some archives, and if so you’ll need to find a place to stay. Many archives can help you find something. Sometimes lists are placed on the archive's website; see, for example, the list provided by the British National Archives. Various academic institutions also provide information about housing. The École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris is a good case in point. See the section on “accommodations” in its Welcome Guide for International Researchers. But probably the best way to find a place to stay is to talk with people in your situation who have recently returned, or who are about to return, from the place you’re planning to visit. If no one in your institution has done research there, you can often find someone from your own country who has. There are a number of fellowship programs designed for scholars who want to do research abroad. For Americans, a few come immediately to mind: the Bourse Chateaubriand program for France, the Marshall Scholarship program for Britain, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst for Germany—and the Fulbright program for many countries. Those links will tell you who has recently gotten a fellowship to work in the place you want to go to; just contact those people and ask them for advice. The same basic procedure should work for citizens of other countries. 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. The main research centers in our field generally have fellowship programs—for example, the Belfer Center at Harvard, CISAC at Stanford, and two programs at Yale: the Grand Strategy program and the Johnson Center. But it would make sense to conduct a more extensive search, and it turns out that a number of universities have websites that make it easy to do just that. Note especially the University of Chicago’s Fellowships Database and UCLA’s GRAPES database. There are also guides to funding focusing on specific areas of research. See, for example, Antje Uhlig and Birgit Zischke, Research-Study-Funding: A German-American Guide for Historians and Social Scientists (Washington DC, 2005), a guide published by the German Historial Institute in Washington. That guide can be supplemented with the more recent listings found on the GHI’s “Opportunities” page. Most of the presidential libraries have small research grant programs. Small travel grants are also often available from various research centers at your home institution. |
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