The Hoover Institution Library & Archives collects, preserves, describes, makes available, and invites engagement with material related to war, revolution, and peace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Library & Archives is a center for research with reading rooms at Stanford University and in Washington, DC, as well as a digital repository. Below are a few key accomplishments and activities from 2024.
Innovating Archival Storage
The Library & Archives launched a pilot project on the use of synthetic DNA as a storage medium for archival material. The famous “Hoover telegram” that established the Institution was the first digitized item stored using this method. DNA data storage technology, while in its early stages, may unlock exciting possibilities for the Library & Archives to encode and decode digital data and historic records.
New Collections
Curators at the Library & Archives foster meaningful relationships and acquire new collections from around the world. Here are some of our noteworthy acquisitions:
Conflict Records Research Center
The Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) collection comprises digitized documents seized by the US military during combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. With more than 11,000 records, 60,000 pages, and 150 hours of audio and visual recordings, the CRRC collection provides insights into the regime of Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda and affiliated groups, and their organizational structure, ideology, governance, and operational planning, among other elements. The CRRC collection is invaluable for researchers examining terrorism, insurgency, authoritarian regimes, and US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Gerd Heidemann Collection
The Gerd Heidemann collection is one of the most comprehensive private archives assembled in Germany after 1945. It includes tens of thousands of original documents drawn mainly from the personal entourage of Adolf Hitler, the SS leadership, and Heidemann’s own journalism, photographs, and interviews. The most historically significant portion of the collection consists of Heidemann’s audio interviews with former high-ranking Nazi Party officials and their associates from the 1970s and 1980s. The interviews reveal the perpetrators of the Holocaust unapologetically taking responsibility for their monstrous crimes.
Xu Wenli Papers
The Xu Wenli collection not only bears witness to the prominent Chinese political activist and dissident’s personal hardship and struggle, but it also documents the uneasy path for China’s democratization and liberation over the past century. A veteran of the People’s Liberation Army Naval Air Force, Xu became a key organizer and eventual cofounder of the Democracy Party of China. Xu’s papers include writings on China’s democratization, written while he was in jail, and other correspondence. Xu’s release from prison to the United States was enabled by President George W. Bush and his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice.
Viktor Porfirievich Petrov Papers
Born in Harbin, China, in 1907, Viktor Porfirievich Petrov was a prolific author, reporter, publisher, and professor. He resided in various regions of China, like many Russian refugees fleeing conflict and Communism after the Russian Revolution, until moving to the United States in 1940. This collection includes, among other elements, letters exchanged with Russian friends Petrov knew in China. Also included are the activities of the Congress of Russian Americans, which Petrov led for many years, and its attempts to influence US-Soviet relations in the 1970s and 1980s.
Digital Collections
An ambitious digitization program continues to transform the way researchers and the public access materials at the Library & Archives. The following are among our recent additions:
Russia Abroad Digital Collection
In 2024, The Hoover Institution Library & Archives launched its Russia Abroad Digital Collection (RADC), an online, open-access platform that provides a global gateway to digitized newspapers of the Russian diaspora between 1917 and 1992. The RADC project intends to digitize all available Russian-language newspapers and enable worldwide research of their contents. In its final form, the RADC site will include nearly 300 titles from up to 30 countries.
Wargaming Digital Collection
Together with Hoover Hargrove Fellow Jacquelyn Schneider, the Hoover Institution launched its Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative Collection, a publicly accessible digital repository housed within the Library & Archives. This collection advances the practice and study of wargaming and crisis simulations by centralizing resources from across government, policy, industry, and academia. The collection currently includes historical and contemporary war games, research, reports, writings, and historical documents. The materials available online will continue to grow over time.
Japanese Diaspora Initiative
As part of the Japanese Diaspora Initiative, the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection remains the world’s largest open-access, online archive of Japanese-language newspapers published outside of Japan during the imperial period. This past year, the Dennis M. Ogawa Nippu Jiji Photograph Collection was made available on the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection with the cooperation of the Hawaii Times Photo Archives Foundation.
H. H. Kung Papers
Banker, minister, and politician H. H. Kung was one of the most significant figures in the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang) government and in the history of modern China. For over a decade, approximately half the H. H. Kung collection was available to researchers only by microfilm in the Library & Archives Reading Room. Now, with full-text searching enabled in English and Chinese, the entire H. H. Kung collection has been digitized and made available for scholars of modern China and Taiwan, opening a new era of research.
Scholarship & Research
The Library & Archives supports the research of faculty, fellows, graduate and undergraduate students, visitors, and other independent scholars and enables the exploration and incorporation of primary sources in their work.
Workshops
Japanese Diaspora
The Hoover Institution Library & Archives and the Japanese Association for Migration Studies cohosted the Third International Workshop on Japanese Diaspora in September 2024. The workshop, supported by the endowed Japanese Diaspora Initiative, encourages rising young scholars to present their new research on Japanese global migration. An international roster of junior scholars, post-docs, and graduate students in modern Japanese history and Japanese American studies were in attendance to discuss the Japanese diaspora from a global perspective.
Modern China and Taiwan
Organized by Hoover research fellow and curator Hsiao-ting Lin, the annual Modern China and Taiwan Workshop in July invited junior and senior researchers to use Hoover’s archival collections and share their research findings with a diverse audience. This year, five speakers from the United States, Britain, and Singapore examined how the Library & Archives’ historical records help shape our understanding of modern China and post-1949 Taiwan.
General Research
From January to December 2024, there were more than 5,400 visits to the Library & Archives Reading Rooms in Stanford, California, and Washington, DC, over 5,500 reference inquiries fielded by Research Services staff, and 21,523 boxes of material prepared for researchers.
Students
A Stanford course, War, Revolution, and Peace: The View from Hoover Tower, introduced students to the history, collections, and operations of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. Inaugurated in Winter Quarter 2024 and sponsored by the International Relations Program, the class met the maximum enrollment of forty-four students. Research Fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude served as course coordinator and was joined by Library & Archives staff to discuss ongoing activities across departments. Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin also joined to highlight how the Library & Archives enabled his research for writing his monumental multivolume biography of Joseph Stalin.
Grants
The third Zahedi Family Fellow, Bita Mousavi, visited the Library & Archives Reading Room to explore the Ardeshir Zahedi Papers and many other Iranian collections. She presented her research paper “No Cadillac Country: Oil, Sovereignty, and Development in Pahlavi Iran.” The Zahedi Family Fellowship, sponsored by Stanford’s Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies, is focused on the Zahedi archives
Education & Outreach
The Library & Archives creates and displays exhibitions, hosts events, and works with students to meaningfully engage those curious about the history of war, revolution, and peace. Explore a few of our favorite programs from 2024:
Exhibitions
The exhibition Un-Presidented: Watergate and Power in America (February–August 2024) illustrated the historic Watergate scandal from the perspectives of those who uncovered, investigated, and prosecuted it. Drawing on documents, illustrations, books, and photographs from the Library & Archives, the installation and its accompanying online exhibition explored how the foundations of a functioning democracy ensure accountability and allow citizens to fight corruption.
To help commemorate the new George P. Shultz Building, and with the generous support of the Koret Foundation, the exhibition George P. Shultz: Statesman and Humanitarian opened in person in July and online in December. Curated from the George P. Shultz papers housed at the Library & Archives, the exhibition highlights Shultz’s effective leadership in pursuit of national civil rights and global human rights, which he considered among his finest achievements.
The number of online Hoover Institution Stories continues to grow. A popular new addition, part of our Voices from the Archives series, is 1956: Hungarian Revolution. Highlighting an array of collection materials about the twelve-day Hungarian Revolution, its resulting humanitarian crisis, and the response from the international community, this digital story is a springboard for deeper dives into Library & Archives collections.
Events
120 Years of Women’s Resistance in Iran and Afghanistan
This panel discussion featured former Hoover oral historian Halima Kazem and National Fellow Kelly J. Shannon and was cosponsored by the Stanford Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Stanford Center for South Asia.
Lou Henry Hoover @ 150
In an event cosponsored by the Stanford Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Stanford Libraries, scholar Annette Dunlap, the most recent biographer of Lou Henry Hoover (1874–1944), gave a talk to celebrate the 150-year legacy of the Hoovers.
Reflections
Launched in December 2023, the video series Reflections from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives features discussions with curators, fellows, and other scholars around selected artifacts and their historical relevance. Videos featuring Director Condoleezza Rice, senior fellows Stephen Kotkin and Amy Zegart, and Research Fellow Jennifer Burns explore topics including Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to the Stanford campus, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, the causes of the Great Depression, and the impact of the Pearl Harbor attack on the US intelligence apparatus.
Selected Publications by the Library & Archives and Featuring Hoover Collections
Explore a few of the books and media featuring the Library & Archives’ collections, together with their accompanying events, from this year:
Charles Palm’s Documenting Communism: The Hoover Project to Microfilm and Publish the Soviet Archives
Documenting Communism reflects on Palm’s role, as former director of the Library & Archives, in leading a twelve-year project to copy ten million pages from the newly opened records of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State following the USSR’s collapse in 1991.
Eiichiro Azuma and Kaoru (Kay) Ueda’s Japanese America on the Eve of the Pacific War: An Untold History of the 1930s
Azuma and Ueda offer the first English translation of Japanese diaspora scholar Yasuo Sakata’s seminal essay arguing that the 1930s constitutes a chronological and conceptual “missing link” between two predominant research interests: the pre-1924 immigration exclusion and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Jennifer Burns’s Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
Burns’s book is the first biography of Friedman to make extensive use of his papers housed at the Library & Archives. In it, Burns traces Friedman’s collaborations, his interventions in policymaking, and his role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism.
Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that, against all odds, undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Nathans captures the definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.
Heath Hardage Lee’s The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady
Lee presents readers with the life and nature of First Lady Pat Nixon: an empathetic, adventurous, self-made woman who wanted no power or influence but who connected with ordinary Americans and the global community alike.
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