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Against the background of the great European war of the early twentieth century, Herbert Hoover’s idea of a scholarly institution collecting documentation on war, revolution, and peace was conceived and developed. Greatly expanded during the decades that followed, European materials now constitute the largest and most comprehensive part of Hoover’s international holdings.
Katharina Friedla is a research fellow and the Taube Family Curator for European Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University. She has studied History, East European and Jewish Studies at the Free University in Berlin, the Hebrew Unive...
The library has acquired complete sets of two rare French periodicals: La Ligue and Celsius, neither of which is listed in American library catalogs; they are available only in the Bibliothèque National in Paris. The acquisition of these two titles by Hoover enhances the strength of the library’s French holdings on the themes of war, revolution, and peace.
The weekly radio interviews of Ėduard Shevardnadze, president of Georgia, during his last years in office are now available at the Hoover Archives. In these interviews Shevardnadze discusses the foreign policy of Georgia, especially relations with the United States and Russia; his trips to foreign countries and various districts of Georgia; visits of foreign statesmen and public figures to Georgia; and recent political, cultural, and social events.
Known affectionately by his youngest fans as “Uncle Ernest,” Ernest Schelling was an American pianist and composer, the founder and for sixteen years the conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Young People’s concerts until his untimely death in 1939. His musical papers, which are held by the University of Maryland’s International Piano Archives, provide detailed documentation of the course of his artistic career, but relatively little has been known or available about Ernest Schelling’s life outside music. The new Hoover collection sheds light on an important segment of his biography: his distinguished career as an intelligence officer and diplomat during and immediately after World War I, and his lifetime friendship with Ignace Jan Paderewski, the charismatic Polish piano virtuoso and statesman.
The Hoover Institution and the National Archives of Estonia have signed an agreement of cooperation for digitizing and sharing records pertaining to Estonia. The first project will be Hoover Archives’ acquiring copies of selected groups of records of the NKVD and of its successor, the KGB of the former Estonian SSSR.
The Hoover Institution Archives has acquired the wartime memoirs of Stanislaw Kroczak, an officer with the Twenty-Second Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps. In his memoirs Kroczak recalls his childhood in a village south of the city of Lwow (now Lviv), his fight against invading German and Soviet forces in September 1939, and his subsequent imprisonment and hard labor in the north of Russia. One charming part of the memoir concerns one of the best-known and celebrated animal mascots of the war, Wojtek the bear.
The Hoover Archives has received the papers of Spas Raikin, a Bulgarian-American historian, and émigré anti-communist activist. His papers, contained in ninety-nine binders, document Raikin’s historical research and writing as well as Bulgarian émigré activities in the United States. Binder nr. 71, however, is different from the others. It documents an episode in Raikin’s life that has a place in world history: his meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in the port at Hoboken, New Jersey on June 13, 1962, when Oswald was returning from the Soviet Union.
Adolf Kurtz, a Protestant pastor, following Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, resisted the government’s efforts to control religious life in Germany. In that his wife was born a Jew, he organized a relief agency to help Christians of Jewish heritage. After the war, in 1948, Pastor Kurtz was invited by the British military authorities in Berlin to come to England to visit German prisoner-of-war camps. A year ago, Hoover Archives acquired a collection of letters, certificates, church registers, and photographs, mostly associated with Pastor Kurtz’s later life in Oxford. The newly acquired increment consists of many original personal documents, mostly from the pastor’s earlier years in Berlin.
The Hoover Archives have received the papers and photographs of Charles Nelson Leach (1884–1971), a US doctor who participated in some of the greatest health emergencies of the twentieth century. His association with programs led by Herbert Hoover and contribution to the building of the Hoover Tower are remembered on the walls inside the lobby of the Hoover Tower, where his name is inscribed in three separate places. The bulk of the Charles Leach collection pertains to the 1917–1920 period. It includes photo albums, calendars, clippings, and a diary of an adventurous 1919 trip, in an ARA Cadillac, through Central and Eastern Europe.
Vaclav Havel is a man of letters—author, playwright, essayist, and poet. A series of more than two hundred letters between him and Czech emigre historian Vilem Precan are now available to researchers at the Hoover Institution. Havel’s correspondence with Precan, like the published prison letters, will be an essential source for future biographers of Vaclav Havel, the man, the writer, and the unlikely hero of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution.
