Collections
The Hoover Institution Library & Archives holds more than one million volumes and over 6,000 archival collections that document war, revolution, and peace and social, political, and economic change that shaped our world in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Search Our Collections
Our collections contain rare and unique library materials and archives that include posters, photographs, texts, sound recordings, moving images, and art and memorabilia.
Documenting war, revolution, and peace, along with political, social, and economic change in the modern era, our collections come from across the globe and in many formats and languages. Search and discover rare materials from all political persuasions which highlight a spectrum of voices and experiences that shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. Personal papers form the bulk of our collections, however we also have extensive photographica, digital records, rare publications, and other formats spanning roughly 30 miles of shelving and evergrowing terabytes of data.
Collecting Areas
Our curators oversee and actively acquire collections which currently originate from 171 countries.
Featured News
News
Hoover Hosts Annual Summer Workshop on Modern China and Taiwan
Held at the Hoover Institution on August 3–7, 2026, this year's workshop featured five speakers, explored Hoover’s unique archival collections, and evaluated how these primary source materials help to reshape our understanding of modern China and post-1949 Taiwan.
News
Hoover Acquires the Papers of Chiang Chung-ling, a Key Figure of the Nationalization of Armed Forces and Military Reform in Taiwan
The newly acquired Chiang Chung-ling papers document the career of a key military figure who helped transform Taiwan's armed forces from instruments of authoritarian rule into defenders of democratic governance during the island-state's transition in the 1990s.
News
Drawn in Silence: Hoover Acquires the Smuggled Sketchbooks of Iranian Kurdish Cartoonist Iraj Varzandeh
Historic satirical drawings made between 1967 and 1971 survived censorship, imprisonment, two wars, and decades of concealment before leaving Iran wrapped in clothing inside garbage bags to pass unnoticed through searches.
News
Papers Of Former Nuremberg Trial Translator Come To Hoover
Hildy Jarman was a multilingual educator who survived the London Blitz and served as a translator at the Nuremberg war trials before teaching at Palo Alto's Castilleja School for over two decades. Her collection — discovered in a travel-worn suitcase — includes rare correspondence with U.S. Army generals and documentation of war crimes investigations, offering a window into the role of women who worked behind the scenes of postwar justice.
News
Hoover And Prague Partner To Digitize World's Largest Russian Diaspora Press Collection
As part of the Library & Archives’ Russia Abroad Digital Collection, the Czech Republic’s Slavonic Library will contribute nearly 1,700 publications chronicling émigré life across dozens of countries following the 1917 Russian Revolution. For the first time, these print records are being united digitally on Hoover's open-access platform, transforming access for scholars studying displacement, political movements, and cultural preservation in the twentieth century.
The Ippei Nomoto (Keizō Norimoto) Papers: A Cornerstone Of Japanese American Intellectual And Community History
This collection of correspondence, manuscripts, and rare Tule Lake publications illuminates the intellectual networks and contested loyalties that shaped Japanese American identity across four decades of the twentieth century.
Featured Collections
Japan and Japanese Diaspora Collections
These collections focus on social, political, and economic change from the Meiji (1868–1911) to post–World War II reconstruction (1945–52) periods in Japan and overseas Japanese communities.
Ukraine Collections
Covering the emergence and development of Ukraine as an independent state since 1991, as well as earlier periods.
Chiang Kai-shek & Chiang Ching-kuo Diaries
The Hoover Institution has been helping preserve the handwritten diaries of Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo since Chiang family members deposited them at Hoover in 2005.
Policies & Practices
We continue to advance Herbert Hoover’s mission by fulfilling our strategic priorities of acquiring important historical collections on war, revolution, and peace. Our collections deal in subjects that encompass a broad range of human experiences. Policies and practices are in place to ensure that materials are cared for and made available for their ongoing use. Learn more about collection donations, description, digitization, preservation practices, and potentially harmful language and visual materials.
