During the recent Hoover Workshop on Totalitarian Regimes, participant Jacob Olidort, who received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in June and is a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, used his knowledge of the Middle East and Arabic to inventory Hoover’s Richard Paul Mitchell Collection. The archive—which originated from one of the most well regarded scholars in the field of Middle Eastern Studies—contains writings, newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and other printed matter relating to the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic culture and political movements, and conditions in Islamic countries. Olidort’s inventory will enhance the existing online finding aid for the collection and be of great value to current and future researchers interested in using the collection for their own projects.

Erik Erlandson, a 2015 Silas Palmer Fellow and doctoral candidate in history at the University of Virginia, researches the political, legal, and economic developments that led to the White House becoming head overseer of regulatory policy. Using the James C. Miller papers at Hoover Archives, Erlandson is completing a dissertation that uncovers the first attempts by executive offices to affect bureaucratic decision-making, and shows how and why these new uses of executive power were legally ratified and politically institutionalized on the eve of the Reagan Revolution.