COLLECTIONS

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Africa
The Africa Collection includes books, government publications, newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and special collections on the economics, politics, and history of sub-Saharan Africa from approximately 1870 to the present. Areas of particular interest are colonial and contemporary history, labor, the military, political parties, including their pamphlets, posters, and election publications. The collection contains more than 85,000 volumes, primarily in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian, with smaller numbers of titles in Spanish, Swahili, Hausa, and Afrikaans.

Americas
The Americas Collection contains materials from North and Latin America. Its primary purpose is to document political, economic, and social developments in the Western Hemisphere. Collecting on the United States has focused on the history of this country during the two world wars and the Korean and Vietnam Wars and on U.S. foreign policy and relations with other countries throughout the twentieth century. The Latin American Collection encompasses political and, to a lesser degree, economic and social developments in selected countries.

East Asia
The collection consists of archival and special materials in the Chinese and Japanese languages acquired by the Hoover Institution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Collections of special materials include rare books, newspapers, banned, illegal, or rare periodicals, political party internal documents, and government (state and local) internal documents. Archival materials include private papers donated by former public servants, military personnel, and others from Japan, China, and Taiwan, and other parts of Asia.

East Europe
The East European Collection, like all collections in the Hoover Institution, focuses primarily on events since the beginning of the twentieth century and on research materials in the original languages.

Middle East
The Middle East Collection has extensive holdings of books, serials, newspapers, pamphlets, government documents, society publications, and archival collections from and about the Middle East. It collects materials from and about all the Arab countries of Western Asia and North Africa, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and Afghanistan. These materials concentrate on twentieth-century history, politics, economics, military affairs, political and social movements, communism and socialism, education as a factor in political and social change, and U.S. national security affairs.

Russian/CIS
The Russian/Soviet/Commonwealth of Independent States Collection of the Hoover Institution is one of the world's great scholarly resources for the study of Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the twentieth century. Geographically, this includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, constituting some of the most important holdings of the Hoover Institution. Subject areas collected include twentieth-century history, politics, government, economics, military affairs, and political and social movements, especially communism.

West Europe
The West European Collection consists of approximately 350,000 books in the various Western languages; 3,000 periodical and newspaper titles, of which 535 are currently received; 15,000 pamphlets; 20,000 posters; and more than 800 archival units.

Judaica
As one of the largest repositories of primary sources relating to twentieth and twenty-first century European and Russian history, the Hoover Institution Archives has numerous documents concerning Jewish individuals and organizations dispersed throughout its collections.

Posters
More than one hundred thousand political posters from around the world are available in the Hoover Archives Poster Collection. Thirty-three thousand of these are cataloged in a searchable database Although many thousands of posters date from World War I and World War II, the collection covers the entire twentieth century. Posters from the United States (approximately 8,700), the United Kingdom (5,000), Germany (4,200), the Russian empire and the Soviet Union (2,600), and France (1,800) predominate, though posters from more than eighty countries are described in the database.

Ephemeral/Rare Materials
The pamphlet and rare book collections are among the Hoover Library's most interesting and valuable holdings.

Broadcast
Radio and television broadcasts focus on news and public affairs programming, primarily since the 1950s. The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasts reached out to audiences in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. English-language broadcasts include speeches presented to the Commonwealth Club of California and William F. Buckley's Firing Line television program. The broadcasts are recorded on a variety of sound and moving image media that often present preservation challenges. As a result, access to these materials is sometimes limited and requires at least two weeks advance notice.