The

Hoover Institution The Hoover Institution (officially The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; abbreviated as Hoover) is an American public policy think tank and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, a ...

Library and Archives is a

research center Center or centre may refer to: Mathematics *Center (geometry), the middle of an object * Center (algebra), used in various contexts ** Center (group theory) ** Center (ring theory) * Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentricit ...

and archival repository located at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

, near

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

. Built around a collection amassed by Stanford graduate

Herbert Hoover Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was an American politician who served as the 31st president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 and a member of the Republican Party, holding office during the onset of the Gre ...

prior to his becoming

President of the United States The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the Federal government of the United States#Executive branch, executive branch of the Federal gove ...

, the Hoover Library and Archives is largely dedicated to the world history of the 20th and 21st centuries. It includes one of the largest collections of political posters in the world.

Organizational history

Background

U.S. President

(1874–1964) was an alumnus of

, graduating in 1895 to become a

mining engineer Mining in the engineering discipline is the extraction of minerals from underneath, open pit, above or on the ground. Mining engineering is associated with many other disciplines, such as mineral processing, exploration, excavation, geology, a ...

. Successful in business enterprise from an early age in a managerial capacity, Hoover also developed a deep affection for

book collecting Book collecting is the collecting of books, including seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever books are of interest to a given collector. The love of books is ''bibliophilia'', and some ...

, building an impressive personal collection. When

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

erupted, Hoover found himself in Europe, quickly becoming involved in ongoing efforts to provide relief aid to wartime

refugee A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution.

s. In 1915 Hoover's professional life intersected with his bibliophilic proclivities when his friend Ephraim D. Adams suggested that Hoover take it upon himself to preserve the records of the organization he directed, the

Commission for Relief in Belgium The Commission for Relief in Belgium or C.R.B. − known also as just Belgian Relief − was an international (predominantly American) organization that arranged for the supply of food to German-occupied Belgium and northern France during the Wor ...

. Hoover accepted this task and began assembling the mass of

books A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physic ...

, posters, and documents which would become the foundation of the so-called "Hoover War Collection" — earliest incarnation of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. Hoover also later recounted that he was further driven in the task of systematic archiving by his own wartime research as food administrator. In the first volume his memoirs, published in 1951, Hoover wrote:

I did a vast amount of reading, mostly on previous wars, revolutions, and peace-makings of Europe and especially the political and economic aftermaths. At one time I set up some research at London, Paris, and Berlin into previous famines in Europe to see if there had developed any ideas on handling relief and pestilence. ... I was shortly convinced that gigantic famine would follow the present war. The steady degeneration of agriculture was obvious. ... I read in one of Andrew D. White's writings that most of the fugitive literature of comment during the
French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are conside ...
was lost to history because no one set any value on it at the time, and that without such material it became very difficult or impossible to reconstruct the real scene. Therein lay the origins of the Library on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Andrew D. White donated his vast collection of ephemera from the French Revolution to Cornell University in 1891. A full account of the founding of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives is provided by George H.Nash in "Herbert Hoover and Stanford University," published by the Hoover Institution Press in 1988. In February 1919, Congress established a new agency known as the

American Relief Administration American Relief Administration (ARA) was an American relief mission to Europe and later post-revolutionary Russia after World War I. Herbert Hoover, future president of the United States, was the program director. The ARA's immediate predeces ...

as a mechanism for the supply of food aid to the hungry people of post-war Europe. Herbert Hoover was tapped by President

Woodrow Wilson Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of ...

to head this agency, and the records of this great enterprise were also incorporated into Hoover's archival holdings. The initial holdings documented the end of

and the peace conference at the end of the war.

Development

Starting in 1919, Hoover donated the collected materials to Stanford, his alma mater, along with funds to maintain and develop the documents. The collection was called the Hoover War Collection and later the Hoover War Library. In August 1920 the first permanent curator of the collection,

Frank A. Golder Frank Alfred Golder (August 11, 1877 – January 7, 1929) was an American historian and archivist specializing in the history of Russia. Golder is best remembered for his work in the early 1920s building the seminal collection of Slavic language mat ...

, headed a team which traveled across Europe to acquire materials. A massive number of books, pamphlets, documents, and posters were acquired, crated, and shipped back to California on behalf of the project. By 1923 more than 40,000 items had been obtained for the collection. The documents were initially housed within the main Stanford Library, but by 1929 the collection had reached 1.4 million items and space was becoming a problem. In 1941

Hoover Tower Hoover Tower is a structure on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California. The tower houses the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, an archive collection founded by Herbert Hoover before he became President of the United Stat ...

was completed as a repository for the growing collection, which was eventually named the Hoover Institution and Library on War, Revolution and Peace. Staff members in subsequent decades have continued to expand the collection systematically. The current holdings include 6,000 separate collections that encompass an estimated 50 million original documents. , the current director of the library and archives is Eric Wakin.

Key collections

The archive is a valuable resource for the following subjects related to Russia: the rise of political parties, Imperial Russian diplomatic archives, the revolutionary movement, Asiatic Russia and its colonization, the "Okhrana", the Russo-Japanese War, and Russia's participation in World War I. Other special collections include the Hoover Institution/Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG)/Russian State Archival Service Cataloging Project and the Soviet Communist Party Archives Microfilming Project. Digitized audiovisual recordings and transcripts of more than 1,500 ''Firing Line'' episodes were contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting via external links from The Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University.

Footnotes

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hoover Institution Archives 1919 establishments in California Herbert Hoover American Relief Administration Stanford University libraries Hoover Institution Archives in the United States Library buildings completed in 1941