Resource of the Week: Foreign Relations of the United States
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

We’ve told you before that we have an unnatural fondness for government documents here on ResourceShelf. And if you’re regular here, you know we are also huge fans of digitized historical collections. This week’s find, from the extensive University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center, “is the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions that have been declassified and edited for publication. The series is produced by the State Department’s Office of the Historian and printed volumes are available from the Government Printing Office.”

Actually, more recent editions of Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) have been available online directly from the State Department Historian’s office. Here you’ll find volumes covering the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon-Ford administrations, and they are searchable. A list of all existing volumes is online here, along with information on whether they can be ordered in print from GPO or where they might otherwise be obtained.

The digital collection at Wisconsin — a joint project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries and the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries (which, it says here, maintains the collection on the State Department site) — “is an incomplete run from 1861-1960 with missing volumes being added as they can be acquired and processed.” You may browse the collection by scrolling and clicking through the 360+ documents, or search the full text of “some or all items.” According to the site, “Full-text searching may not be available for every title. If full-text searching is not available, you may still search by title, author, and section title.” In addition to the default search form are options that allow you to perform boolean or proximity searching.

Curiosity led me to the document “Foreign relations of the United States, 1958-1960. Cuba” (U.S. Interest in the Cuban Revolution, the Overthrow of the Batista Government, and the Consolidation of Power by Fidel Castro). You can display the page images in several sizes by clicking on icons arranged in what looks like a bar graph in the lefthand navigation panel; the images are extremely clear and readable even in the smallest size. If you want to print out a page, click on the “Image for printing” link to display the page image by itself in your browser, without navigational frames, etc. I particularly enjoyed browsing the List of Persons section of this particular document:

This list is designed to provide identification of those persons mentioned most frequently in this volume. The list generally covers only the years 1958-1960. All titles and positions are American unless otherwise indicated. Where no dates are given, the person usually held the position throughout the period. In some cases, it has not been possible to determine all positions and titles held.

Lots of familiar names here and a plethora of minor players, too. It would be way cool if the extensive index were hyperlinked; alas, you’ll have to browse page by page by page by page…or give the search engine a run for its money.

Last year I did have a customer writing a research paper about Cuban-American relations in this particular time period, and he would have found this extremely useful. Extensive search and navigation help is available, as are citation URLs for each individual document.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 and is filed under Archives and Special Collections, Digitization Projects, Government Documents and Political Information, History, Resource of the Week, Resources for Educators, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.