The year 2021 was one of both continuity and transition for the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. Our colleagues worked both onsite and remotely and, by summer, we began our return to the Stanford University campus, marking these milestones: In June, we celebrated the 80th anniversary of Hoover Tower; in September, we were the first library at Stanford University to reopen to the public; in October, as part of our Digital First Initiative, we launched our first interactive online exhibition featuring fully digitized collections; and in November, we reopened Hoover Tower’s exhibition spaces to Stanford affiliates.
Throughout the year, we continued to collect the world’s most significant materials on war, revolution, and peace across the globe. We continued to focus on description, preservation, conservation, and digitization so that our collections can be made available to anyone, on any internet-enabled device, anywhere. Along with our research services team, who also provided remote reference support, we facilitated engagement with our collections, in person and in the reading room. Public engagement with our collections also expanded with our education and outreach efforts, which included new online and physical exhibitions, classes, and workshops. We also hosted events and programs that explain the historical value of our collections to a broad public audience.
We highlight many of our accomplishments and activities for 2021 below, and as we look ahead into the new year, we are excited at the prospect of welcoming even more people back to the Library & Archives.
Hoover Institution Library & Archives Year in Review 2021
Celebrating the Lives of George and Charlotte Shultz, and Breaking Ground for the George P. Shultz Building
In early December we learned of the passing of Charlotte M. Shultz. Mrs. Shultz spent much of her life devoted to public service and became a part of the Hoover family, making an indelible mark on our community.
Mrs. Shultz was with us in October, when family, friends, and many others honored her husband and our colleague, George P. Shultz, at a memorial service at Stanford’s Memorial Church. The next day, ground was broken on the new George P. Shultz Building, which will include spaces for scholars and a state-of-the-art digitization facility, a center for description, imaging, metadata, conservation, and preservation of collections in a singular space like no other on the Hoover Institution campus. This space will enable greater access to the institution’s world-renowned collections and place the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at the forefront in archival digitization. In an image prominently displayed at the construction site, Mr. Shultz (right), with then president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev (left), holds a 1921 Soviet poster from the Hoover Institution’s archives, which depicts students learning to read. The text is from Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and translates to: “Long live the sun! May the darkness be hidden!” Mr. Shultz, on behalf of the Stanford community, presented the poster to Gorbachev “with our respect and pleasure at having you here” during the latter’s visit to Stanford University on June 4, 1990.
Ardeshir Zahedi and the Zahedi Archives
Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi is considered one of the most influential figures during the last two decades of monarchy in Iran. He was the last Iranian ambassador to the United States under the shah and also came to personally know nine American presidents—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. In 2018, the archive of Ardeshir Zahedi opened to the public for research. A selection of key documents from the collection was published in A Window into Modern Iran: The Ardeshir Zahedi Papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (Hoover Institution Press, 2019). On December 10, we held an online symposium that was widely attended in memory of Ambassador Zahedi, who passed away on Thursday, November 18, 2021, in Switzerland.
The Fanning the Flames Project
The yearlong Fanning the Flames project contained a perfect formula of scholarship, technology, creativity, and dedication by the Library & Archives team, which refocused efforts during the COVID pandemic to engage members of the public and supporters through virtual programming. The project focused on virtual collaborations with scholars from around the world, providing access to our collections of nishiki-e (multicolored woodblock prints) and kamishibai (paper plays), and publishing richly illustrated essays in digital and print formats, including the book Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan (Hoover Institution Press, 2021), edited by Dr. Kaoru (Kay) Ueda, curator of the Japanese Diaspora Collection at Hoover. The project is also accompanied by a new interactive website and popular speaker series, with seven lectures to date, the most recent of which was held on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. A Fanning the Flames exhibition, located in Hoover Tower at Stanford University, is currently open to Stanford affiliates, with the expectation that it will be opened to the broader public in the new year.
Hoover Tower’s 80-Year Anniversary
The Hoover Tower was dedicated on June 20, 1941, and the Library & Archives celebrated the 80th anniversary by presenting a carillon concert—including a special composition, Allegro, by Stanford graduate student and carillonneur Julie Zhu—and a discussion with leading architects Sapna Marfatia, Stanford University director of architecture, and Jeffrey Tilman, professor of architecture at the University of Cincinnati, along with Library & Archives director Eric Wakin on the construction of the tower, its structural evolution, and its continued significance. A social media campaign, “#AroundHooverTowerIn80Days” featured select items from the library’s holdings and other rarely seen treasures.
Collections Open for Research
George Pratt Shultz Papers
After review, and with the blessing of Charlotte Shultz, we opened the first portion of the George Shultz Papers, including those from his time as secretary of state and of the Treasury, on November 10, which is also the US Marine Corps birthday. Shultz served as a Marine during World War II, from 1942 to 1945, then returned home to earn his doctorate in industrial economics. Major Shultz was honorably discharged in 1957.
Wojciech Jaruzelski Papers
The Wojciech Jaruzelski papers are open for research. Jaruzelski was the last leader of Communist Poland before the period that ushered in Lech Walesa as president. These papers are a significant addition to the Hoover Institution’s already world-famous Polish holdings, the largest and most comprehensive documentation on modern Poland outside of the country.
Additional Collections
● Justus Doenecke was an American historian, writer, professor, and leading scholar of the America First Committee. Read more.
● Wang Zuanxu was a Nationalist Chinese military leader from Sichuan Province. Read more.
● The Afghan Serials Collection has been expanded. To date, 958,492 pages have been digitized.
● This year, 415,000 pages (9.8M to date) have been digitized within the Global Press Archive (in partnership with East View). This includes the Al-Ahram Digital Archive, the Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers, and the Middle Eastern and North African Newspapers.
Acquisition Highlights
Captain Mitsuo Fuchida Collection
The entire private collection of Captain Mitsuo Fuchida was generously gifted by the Fuchida family. Fuchida, who was a commanding pilot of the first wave of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, survived that attack, the Battle of Midway, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. As one of the few Japanese survivors and primary participants of the Pearl Harbor attack, Fuchida held a distinct perspective, some of which was later demonstrated to be false, but which nonetheless contributed to the understanding of the Pacific theater in World War II. Read more.
Economists’ Papers: June O’Neill and Richard H. Timberlake Jr.
Manuscripts, correspondence, publications, and other historical materials related to the lives and careers of June O’Neill and Richard H. Timberlake Jr. provide insight on these free-market economists. June O’Neill has authored several notable books and articles on the economics of human capital; wage differentials based on gender, education, and race; and health care reform. Richard H. Timberlake Jr. was an expert on the Federal Reserve, banking, and legal tender, and a contemporary of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. He examined the causes of the Great Depression and advocated free banking.
Sergei Kovalev Papers
Sergei Kovalev was a former member of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. He became a US citizen and made a career as an engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. His papers (dating from 1904 to 1947) consist primarily of personal documents illustrating his life and a number of his writings, many of which are autobiographical in character, and describe his life in Russia, China, and San Francisco.
William Hallam Tuck Papers
William Hallam Tuck, a colleague of Herbert Hoover, worked extensively with refugees and relief organizations in Europe. New materials included in this collection were found in a trunk in a Swiss chateau once owned by Tuck’s family and include correspondence and notes related to Tuck’s career in humanitarian aid and food relief during the world wars and his work with the International Refugee Organization. Read more.
Samuel Kelly
Samuel Kelly was an electronic engineer involved in commercial negotiations and sales of US technology to the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s. The collection is a window into Soviet attempts to gain access to Western technology and goods, and US attempts to ensure security and technological superiority in relation to the Soviet Union.
Wang Jingwei
Wang Jingwei was one of the most controversial and complex political leaders in modern China. He was a trusted follower of Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist government, and went on, infamously, to lead the Japanese collaborationist government in China during World War II. In the collection, personal papers, include family correspondences, writings and manuscripts, and valuable artifacts created or collected by Wang, including calligraphy, paintings, and seals.
Digital First Initiative
The Digital First Initiative team has built the technological infrastructure, using both onsite and proprietary systems, to support a robust digitization pipeline. The goal of the initiative is to provide access to digitized collections to anyone, on any internet-enabled device, anywhere. The team is now turning to scaling up production. In partnership with our curators and exhibition team, we digitized 20,316 images (which include the archives of Charles Beach Boothe, Ardeshir Zahedi, and others) plus 2,400 images from 14 collections for the Fanning the Flames project, which includes nishiki-e (colored woodblock prints) and kamishibai (paper plays). The total number of visitors to our Digital Collections and Collected Works of Milton Friedman websites is 104,000, and our top-10 most viewed collections on Digital Collections are:
- Poster collection
- Firing Line broadcast records
- Theodore Fred Abel papers
- Okhrana records
- Commonwealth Club of California records
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) broadcast records
- Overseas Weekly photographs
- Aleksandr Fyodorovish Kerensky miscellaneous papers
- Mieczyslaw Jalowiecki memoirs and drawings
- Pasternak family papers
Research, Education, Outreach
Research Services
For our vibrant community of researchers, our Research Services reference request support team delivered approximately 60,000 pages of scanned materials in 2021. This includes 22,000 images and 21,862 microfilm scans completed by our Digital Services & Systems team. Since reopening the reading room to the public in September, we have hosted 105 researchers (57 percent were non–Stanford affiliates) and answered more than 600 remote reference requests. Our circulation numbers for class activities included 405 items requested and pulled, and total boxes moved for all research services was more than 1,850.
Education, Outreach, and Engagement
By the summer months, we restarted in-person classroom visits and tours of our collection, and by the fall 2021 quarter, we had a number of activities including special visits, tours, and class interactions. We hosted 12 sessions with various Stanford courses across disciplines and departments, including history, art history, art studio, program in writing and rhetoric, and Iberian and Latin American cultures. As a result, 140 undergraduate and graduate students visited the Library & Archives and explored our unique collections. Our goal continues to be to facilitate student engagement opportunities through the promotion of our collections and services.
Through our exhibition programs, we published several new online storytelling presentations in our series Hoover Institution Stories (HISTORIES), which showcases narratives from Hoover’s library and archival collections. These included:
● On the Record: Life Lessons from George P. Shultz
● Voices from the Archives: Japanese American Internment, 1942–1946
● Civil Discourse: Highlights from “Firing Line” from 1966 to 1999
Collaborations & Publications
Agreement with Academia Historica, Taiwan
On September 13, 2021, a memorandum of understanding on academic collaboration was signed between the Hoover Institution Library & Archives and the Academia Historica of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Both share common interests in the research of modern history, contributing to archival research and the study of public policy of Taiwan and the United States.
Publications
Slavic & East European Information Resources Journal focused on articles for Hoover’s centennial authored by:
● Elena S. Danielson, Hoover Institution Archivist, Emerita
● Simon Ertz, Hoover Centennial Librarian for Collection Analysis
● Edward Kasinec, Visiting Fellow
● Ognjen Kovačević, Metadata Librarian
● Bertrand Patenaude, Research Fellow
● Anatol Shmelev, Robert Conquest Curator for Russia and Eurasia and Research Fellow
● Lyudmila Shpileva, visiting researcher
485 Days at Majdanek
In this memoir, Jerzy Kwiatkowski tells the harrowing tale of the 16 months he spent at Majdanek, a concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin in German-occupied Poland. In stark detail, he describes the organization and operations of the camp and, for its prisoners, the fierce struggle for survival. The edition has been translated into English for the first time and includes an introduction written by Hoover senior fellow Norman Naimark. The book is richly illustrated with rare archival images from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives and the State Museum at Majdanek, who are proud to make this valuable historical record available to a wide audience.
Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan, edited by Kay Ueda, curator of the Japanese Diaspora Initiative, takes a comprehensive look at how Japan deployed popular arts for propaganda that created an imperialist fervor. Inside are scholarly essays by experts, with more than 100 rich color illustrations from the collections of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, including woodblock prints, photos, posters, and the rarely examined street paper plays called kamishibai, many of which had been destroyed or lost by the end of the Second World War.
In the Wake of Empire: Anti-Bolshevik Russia in International Affairs, 1917–1920, written by Anatol Shmelev, Robert Conquest Curator for Russia and Eurasia and Hoover research fellow, examines the personalities, institutions, political culture, and geostrategic concerns that shaped the foreign policy of the anti-Bolshevik governments and attempts to define the White movement through them. Additionally, Shmelev provides a fascinating psychological study of the factors that ultimately doomed the White effort: an irrational and ill-placed faith in the desire of the Allies to help them, and wishful thinking with regard to their own prospects that obscured the reality around them.
Russia in War and Revolution: The Memoirs of Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff presents for the first time the memoirs of a career military officer born into a noble Russian family who observed firsthand key events of the early 20th century, including the 1905–7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea. The memoir, edited by Gary M. Hamburg, was translated from an unpublished Russian manuscript and annotated by Olferieff's granddaughter Tanya Alexandra Cameron.
