Greetings to all of the friends and supporters of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. We wish you the happiest of holidays at the close of this highly unusual year.
Despite the challenges of the 2020 global pandemic, we at the Library & Archives have continued to focus on collecting, preserving, and sharing our collections, albeit in new ways. Since mid-March, the Library & Archives has transitioned to a hybrid work model that allows us to protect the health and well-being of our staff and the greater research community while continuing to advance our mission to collect materials and serve the research community.
Paramount is our Digital First initiative, which aims to transform access to our holdings. Getting our collections online and accessible to remote researchers is more important now than ever. Our Digital First team continues the planning and deployment of the systems infrastructure, storage, and workflow tools that will enable the mass digitization of collection material. Archivists and librarians, working remotely, continue to describe collections using metadata that will allow them to be discovered by person and machine, in support of students, scholars, and the general public. Simultaneously, we continue planning the digitization labs that will be part of the new George P. Shultz Fellows Building.
Our curators continue to speak and meet with donors virtually while working with their colleagues to ensure that collections in transit arrive safely and are stored securely. Meanwhile, our research and education teams continue to respond to inquiries and support the research of fellows; plan for broader engagement among the Stanford student body and beyond; prepare for our future physical exhibitions and launch virtual ones; and plan workshops, speaker series, and visiting fellow support once the restrictions on movement are lifted.
The Library & Archives will be closed from December 14, 2020, to January 4, 2021. We look forward to reconnecting with you virtually and, when possible, in person in the new year. We are grateful for your continued support in our commitment to historical preservation and education.
Highlights of the year 2020 at the Library & Archives include the following:
HONORING GEORGE P. SHULTZ
To honor the remarkable legacy of George Pratt Shultz, Hoover’s Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow, Library & Archives opened a new exhibition featuring important points in Shultz’s accomplished life and career. Installed in the Annenberg Conference Room in February, On the Record: Life Lessons from George P. Shultz is a didactic display highlighting inspirational quotes by Shultz to encourage those who will meet, debate, and grow during events in the space. The exhibition also provides a rich tapestry of photographs and milestones from Shultz’s life—spanning his time as a Marine in World War II to his work at Hoover today. In the above photo, Hoover Library & Archives staff members join Shultz in celebrating the opening of the exhibition. This month, an online version of the exhibition will be launched.
RETURN OF THE BA’TH PARTY COLLECTION TO IRAQ
On Monday, August 31, a US Air Force C-5 transport plane landed at Baghdad Airport with more than four hundred pallets in its hold containing the paper records of the Ba’th Party Archive. The return of the archives to Iraq was the culmination of a multiyear planning process among the Hoover Institution and the governments of Iraq and the United States. We are grateful to all who helped in this process, including Iraqi ambassador Fareed Yasseen and his many colleagues, Kanan Makiya at the Iraq Memory Foundation, everyone who assisted on behalf of the US government, and our own colleagues at the Hoover Library & Archives. The collection has been at Hoover since 2008 and has been accessed by hundreds of researchers seeking to learn and write about Saddam Hussein’s regime. We will continue to provide access to the digital records of the collection at Hoover. More information is available in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
RESEARCH CONTINUES DESPITE COVID-19
In June we reopened our reading room to Stanford University affiliates in our continued effort to connect researchers to our collections. During the first three months of reopening, we served nearly 800 archival and library items over the course of 185 visits to our reading room. In the new year we plan to continue to provide in-person access to our collection material in ways that are safe for our staff and research community.
COVID has forced the Library & Archives to rethink how we support researchers and to ensure we have the resources to provide remote support via digitization. Our colleagues have been working safely to ensure essential research continues. During the COVID period, we have provided more than 53,000 digital copies of film, audio, photographs, posters, and documents to researchers. Among the top ten most-requested collections by remote researchers relate to William F. Buckley’s Firing Line; historian and former revolutionary Boris Nicolaevsky; counterinsurgency expert Edward Lansdale; Iranian ambassador Ardashir Zahedi; and economist Friedrich Hayek. Our experience serving remote researchers continues to inform how we build out our Digital First Initiative for mass digitization.
DIGITAL FIRST INITIATIVE
In recognition of the vital role that large-scale digitization and open online access plays in advancing historical research, remote and on-site teams have made significant progress on the Digital First/Virtual Library (DF/VL) Initiative this year. This initiative affords us the opportunity to radically reimagine current processes, create new services, and sustain operations in order to enable more users to unlock the value of Library & Archi\ves’ distinct collections and harness the transformative power of the historical record to address the world’s current, most challenging social, political, and economic issues.
The Digital First Initiative aims to create a future in which Hoover’s collections are available anywhere, anytime, and on any device. While the Library & Archives has been converting material to digital format for years, it is now designing and deploying systems and processes that will enable us to make significant content available at scale. These materials will be available on Hoover’s Open Access Portal, currently under development and set to launch in spring 2021.
HI STORIES LAUNCH
The closure of the Hoover Tower and exhibit galleries as a result of COVID-19 has also underscored the Library & Archives’ effort to not only digitize materials but also expand its outreach to online audiences. With this objective in mind, in May 2020, archivists began creating and publishing HI Stories, a series of dynamic storytelling features that showcase treasures from Hoover’s more than six thousand collections and one million library volumes and uncover their importance to the record of modern history. Stories have included the life and work of Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover; the history of the Hoover Institution; and explorations into some of the most fascinating collections concerning the global struggle for freedom against authoritarianism, and the quest for peace against the making of war.
THE BATTALION ARTIST
In remembrance of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Library & Archives presented a new series of HI Stories in the online exhibition The Battalion Artist: A Sailor’s Journey Through the South Pacific. Visitors embark with Natale Bellantoni, a gifted artist and member of the US Navy Seabees, on his wartime journey through a collection of digitally immersive stories. Within each story, Bellantoni’s personal experiences in the Pacific theater, and the role the Seabees played in winning the war, are illuminated through newly digitized sketches, paintings, correspondence, and photographs from the Natale Bellantoni papers. Contributing to the growing documentation on the vital contributions of the Seabees to the American war effort, The Battalion Artist is also a deeply personal look at a young man’s life interrupted by war.
NEW ACQUISITIONS
America First Committee Collections
This year Hoover Archives acquired two new collections to complement its America First Committee records, which document the isolationist movement in America prior to World War II. Hoover acquired the papers of the America First Committee’s founder, Robert Stuart Douglas Jr., as well as the papers of Justus Doenecke, historian and author of In Danger Undaunted, a seminal text for understanding the movement and its impact on American policy in the wartime era.
Kemp Nye
The Library & Archives acquired the papers of Kemp Nye, a Marine Corps officer at the center of the Sino-Japanese conflict during the Second World War. As a member of the Horse Marine Guards, Nye was assigned to protect the US Embassy in Peking (Beijing) during the Japanese invasion of 1937–38. After a brief return to the United States, Nye was called back to fight against Japanese forces in the Pacific theater. Nye’s papers include a manuscript and almost 2,500 photographic prints related to his experiences in Asia. These papers present a rarely described landscape of the American military presence in Beijing as well as daily life in 1930s China.
Michel Oksenberg
The Library & Archives acquired the papers of Michel Oksenberg (1938–2001), a renowned political scientist and China expert who played a crucial role in the negotiations that led to the normalization of US-China relations in early 1979. The papers consist of interview transcripts of US and Chinese officials involved in the normalization of relations, along with research notes, rare Chinese maps, newspapers and local gazetteers of Shandong Province, and photos and slides of Oksenberg’s activities in China (including Jimmy Carter’s 1997 trip to Shandong Province) in the late 1980s and the 1990s.
Peter Kudrik
Hoover acquired the papers of journalist and Slavic librarian Peter Kudrik, born Petr Aleksandrovich Kudrin in Russia in 1914. The collection includes Kudrik’s diaries and autobiographical writings related to his life in Poland during World War II. In these he describes the onset of the war and gives details on the early days of the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland from the point of view of a Russian émigré residing in the country. Particularly significant are the detailed diary entries describing Kudrik’s experience in Warsaw in 1944, the final period of German occupation that culminated in the Warsaw Uprising.
Adol’f Adol’fovich Endrzheevskii
The Library & Archives acquired the papers of Adol’f Adol’fovich Endrzheevskii, a commissioned officer in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I and a battalion commander for the Russian Corps in Yugoslavia during World War II. Highlights of this collection include correspondence regarding the activities of Russian émigrés during and after the Second World War, particularly their involvement in military operations against Yugoslav communist guerrillas. The collection also includes Endrzheevskii’s work with displaced Russian people throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Huang Pai-chi and Wang Hou
Hoover acquired two new collections that shed light on modern China’s complicated history and build upon Hoover’s rich collections that advance historical understanding of nationalist China and Taiwan, such as the personal diaries of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo (the president of Taiwan between 1978 and 1988), and the Kuomintang party archives. The papers of legendary female guerilla leader Huang Pai-chi and of special operations expert Wang Hou reveal the often overlooked history of covert activities executed by Chinese nationalists during World War II.
Mikhail Dem’ianovich Getmanov
Hoover acquired the memoir of Mikhail Dem’ianovich Getmanov, a Russian major general who served in World War I and became a leader of the White Army after the Russian Revolution. The memoir, accompanied by photographs, describes Getmanov's life and career, beginning with his childhood and covering his years in post–World War II displaced persons camps, his emigration to the United States, and his life in New Kuban, an émigré Cossack community in New Jersey, where he died on January 26, 1978. The collection also includes valuable correspondence that illuminates large historical questions relating to the activities of Russian émigrés during World War II and to internal politics and conflicts among Cossacks.
HONORING LIBRARY & ARCHIVES RESEARCHERS
In August, we celebrated the career of Library & Archives deputy director Linda Bernard, who retired after more than forty years of service to the Hoover Institution. Bernard, now director emerita, is not only an expert on the collections held at the Archives but a leader who inspires staff with her passion, enthusiasm, kindness, and knowledge. Her treasure tours for visitors and students have for decades been one of the Library & Archives’ most popular and sought out attractions. The entire Hoover staff will miss Linda terribly, but we wish her all the best for future endeavors and a happy retirement!
Dr. Maciej Siekierski, senior curator and curator of European collections, retired in March after a thirty-six-year career and was appointed senior curator emeritus. By painstakingly cultivating a network of contacts across Europe, Siekierski made Library & Archives the preeminent source for scholars seeking material on Eastern Europe and, specifically, Poland. In 1989 Siekierski and his family moved to Poland to establish the Hoover Warsaw Office, which for two years capitalized on the collapse of the Soviet rmpire and brought untold archival material to Hoover. We thank Maciej for the KGB archives of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; the papers of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the final first secretary of the Polish Communist Party; the papers of General Czesław Kiszczak, the last interior minister and prime minister of communist Poland; and hundreds other collections. A book Maciej championed, Jerzy Kwiatkowski’s 485 Days in Majdanek, will be published by Hoover Institution Press, with an introduction by Norman Naimark, in 2021.
NEW PUBLICATIONS
In the five meticulously researched essays of On a Collision Course: The Dawn of Japanese Migration in the Nineteenth Century (Hoover University Press, 2020), Yasuo Sakata, former professor at Osaka Gakiun University, examines Japanese migration to the United States from a holistic, international, and deeply historical perspective, considering the value of source documents from both sides of the Pacific. Sakata incorporates an understanding of diplomatic relationships, the effects of war and mass media, the context of Chinese immigration, labor conditions, and Japan’s self-image as a modern, westernized nation. On a Collision Course is edited by Kaoru Ueda, curator of the Library & Archives’ Japanese Diaspora Initiative. Click here to read an interview with Ueda about the making of the book.
Modern Brazil: A Social History
In Modern Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Herbert S. Klein, curator of the Library & Archives’ Latin America collection, and Francisco Vidal Luna, professor of economics at the Universidade de São Paulo, present a sweeping narrative of social change in Brazil that documents its transition from a predominantly rural and illiterate society in 1950 to an overwhelmingly urban, modern, and literate society in the twenty-first century. Tracing this radical evolution, Modern Brazil reveals how industrialization created a new labor force, how demographic shifts reorganized the family and social attitudes, and how urban life emerged in what is now one of the most important industrial economies in the world.
In Search of Our Frontier
Hoover Visiting Fellow Azuma Eiichiro received the 2020 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association for his latest monograph In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire (University of California Press, 2019). Azuma Eiichiro is an associate professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History is offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800.
