Joseph Stilwell began his diary in the early 1900s and kept it up, to a greater or lesser extent, until his death in 1946. Now those decades of diaries, including observations on his travels through China, Japan, and the Philippines before World War II, are available on the Hoover Archives website. They supplement Stilwell’s World War II diaries, transcriptions of which Hoover has offered online since 2005. All are part of the Joseph W. Stilwell papers at Hoover.

The Hoover Institution has recently acquired Herbert Romerstein’s archives, the result of some sixty years of his research and collecting. When fully processed and registered, it will be Hoover’s largest collection on the subversive activities of communist action and communist front organizations in the United States and abroad, substantially complementing the holdings of two large Hoover collections with a similar focus: the US Subversive Activities Control Board records and the William T. Poole collection.

The recently acquired Javier Benedet collection contains significant materials relating to the Spanish Civil War and to fundraising efforts in Northern California on behalf of the Republican side in that conflict. The Benedet papers also provide documentation on the plight of Republican refugees in the aftermath of the Civil War and on the political life of the Spanish anti-fascist diaspora in France, Mexico, and other countries. In terms of volume, the Benedet papers now constitute the second largest collection (after the Burnett Bolloten papers) in the archives pertaining to the Spanish Civil War.

The Hoover Archives has received a collection of documents, postcards and letters connected with the work of the American Relief Administration. Herbert Hoover organized and directed the ARA, providing assistance to millions of displaced and hungry victims of World War I. The collection, consisting mostly of stamped postal requests and acknowledgements from individuals and private organizations assisting in the American aid effort, covers the entire period of the ARA’s operation in Central and Eastern Europe, from its early 1919 start in Austria, Hungary and Poland, until the summer of 1923, the end of the American mission in Moscow.