The Hoover Institution Library & Archives Year in Review 2022

The mission of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives remains guided by President Hoover’s vision: “The purpose of this institution is to promote peace. Its records should stand as a challenge to those who promote war. They should attract those who search for peace.” Below we highlight some of our accomplishments and activities for 2022.

Standing with Ukraine 

Weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, the Library & Archives collaborated with Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) to host a discussion related to collecting archival material in the Donbass conflict region. Participants included Research Fellow Anatol Shmelev, Robert Conquest Curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Library & Archives; Research Fellow Rose Gottemoeller; Andriy Kohut, visiting scholar at CREEES and director of the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine; Steven Pifer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; and Amir Weiner, director of CREEES. Months later, Shemlev was able to complete a collecting trip to Ukraine. The trip yielded material that includes a now-famous stamp memorializing the response to Russian warships by Ukrainian defenders on Snake Island. Members of the Library & Archives continue to support efforts to collect and preserve digital materials, including messages on channels of the Telegram app related to the war. In response to cultural heritage professionals’ calls for international support on behalf of preserving important historical materials, Stanford student Catarina Buchatskiy created the Shadows Project, an online forum dedicated to coordinating aid efforts. In support of conservation efforts, the Library & Archives worked with Buchatskiy to source and acquire fireproof cabinets, blankets, generators, and other emergency preservation material to protect archival and other cultural materials in Ukraine.

New Collections 

Hoover’s curators continued to acquire significant historical archives related to war, revolution and peace from across the globe:

• Chan Cheong-choo (陳昌祖) was a core member of the Japanese puppet government in China under Wang Jingwei during World War II. Chan’s personal papers, along with those of Wang Jingwei, Tao Hengsheng, and other “collaborationists” held at Hoover, provide a view into the intricate and complex political landscape of 20th-century China. 
• This summer marked the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, a watershed moment in American political history. The entire collection of John Ehrlichman, who was one of President Richard Nixon’s most trusted aides and a key figure of the era, opened for research and is featured in the Fall issue of the Hoover Digest. The story of Watergate is one of the power of record-keeping and the mysteries of records lost.
• Viacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov was a world-renowned Russian-born scholar and one of the most influential figures in late Soviet and post-Soviet academe, cultural life, and society. The tremendous scope of the subjects in this collection corresponds to the amazing breadth of Ivanov’s interests and endeavors: social and cultural history, linguistics, philosophy, religion, mythology, literature, anthropology, psychology, film, oriental studies, and poetics.
• Sergeant Leo McDowell was a decorated African American marine who served during three American wars (World War II, Korea, and Vietnam) and earned accolades as a Marine Corps recruiter. He served on the Steward Inspection and Demonstration Team, which sought equality for Black stewards serving under officers and with Ronald Reagan while Reagan was governor of California and later president of the United States. His collection represents a notable career and the changing policies concerning race that affected the US military from the 1940s to the 1980s.
• Kao Tsu was a Nationalist Chinese naval officer who served under Chiang Kai-shek. His personal papers document an unusual and forgotten aspect in the long history of modern China and of Taiwan’s military relationship with the United States.

Increasing Access to Collections

Giving a fresh new look to the Library & Archives’ online presence, the hoover.org website and the new Digital Collections portal (currently in beta) offer intuitive navigation and even more information about resources that aim to increase access to collections both in-person and virtually. This year, the reading room hosted more than 3,300 visits and more than 190,000 users visited Hoover’s holdings of digitized collections. 

The number of digitized materials continues to grow. Nearly 200,000 images were captured for collections, including: 

• Alexander H. Buchman papers
• H. H. Kung 孔祥熙 papers
• Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff papers
• American Relief Administration Russian operational records 
• Frederick Dorsey Stephens papers 
• Charles L. Hall papers
• Raymond McKnight Sloan papers  

Digitization of the papers of Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ardeshir Zahedi, and many others continues in concert with description and preservation work. 

Engaging Our Communities 

Exhibitions, classes, tours, and talks – the Hoover Tower was abuzz this year with more than 33,000 students, scholars, and Stanford visitors engaging with the rich historical collections of the Library & Archives. We were excited to reopen Hoover Tower’s exhibition galleries and popular observation deck to public visitors and engage students and special visitors in our classroom spaces. Some highlights:

Exhibitions

• Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan, was a multiplatform project that includes a companion publication, a website, a speaker series, and an exhibition that opened in 2021 and closed in July during which we had nearly 19,000 visitors. It is still on view virtually through a recorded gallery tour and behind-the-scenes discussion moderated by Kaoru Ueda, curator of the Japanese Diaspora collection. 
• To commemorate the centennial of Herbert Hoover’s food and medical relief efforts in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, two exhibitions, guest curated by Research Fellow Bertrand Patenaude, opened this year. The first, Bread + Medicine: Saving Lives in a Time of Famine, on view in Hoover Tower through April 2023, along with its companion online exhibition, showcases the medical relief operations of Hoover’s American Relief Administration during the famine of 1921. An ongoing Bread + Medicine Speaker Series highlights conversations with historians of Russia and Ukraine and leading experts on famine and humanitarianism. The second is Deliverance: America and the Famine in Soviet Russia, 1921–1923, an exhibition at the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa, based in large part on the Library & Archives’ collections. Patenaude and other scholars visited West Branch to attend a special symposium in honor of Hoover’s humanitarian efforts and in connection with the exhibition.
• A pop-up exhibition of materials from the Library & Archives’ collections documented an array of African American experiences in the 20th century.  It accompanied the Hoover Institution’s inaugural Juneteenth Freedom Day (June 19) celebration led by Tad and Dianne Taube Director Condoleezza Rice. 
• The annotated Bibles of Salvation Army captain Masuo Kitaji were loaned to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to be featured as the highlight objects in the exhibition Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration. 

Student Engagement 

• The Library & Archives cosponsored Escape from Topicland along with Stanford Libraries and the Stanford Graduate School of Education. This event, led by Tom Mullaney, professor of history at Stanford, helped students navigate the early phase of conducting research and engaged professors, undergrads, and graduate students in a discussion focused on getting students into the archives to do hands-on research. 
• Four Stanford students spent the year researching the American Relief Administration Russian operation records as part of a CREEES-directed reading course. Their essays will be featured in the Bread + Medicine online exhibition as well as the forthcoming winter Hoover Digest.
• Stanford students interested in learning about Iranian archives toured the Library & Archives' expansive Iranian collections in an open house led by Dr. Abbas Milani, the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University and Hoover research fellow.

Workshops and Book Talks

• Scholars from around the world gained hands-on experience and access to many unique and rare primary sources from Hoover's fast-growing holdings with the return of the Library & Archives’ workshops, which promote multidisciplinary, scholarly discourse on specified areas of study.  This year's workshops included: Authoritarianism and Democratic Breakdown, led by Senior Fellow Norman M. Naimark and Research Fellow Paul R. Gregory; Modern China and Taiwan, led by Research Fellow and Curator for Modern China and Taiwan Collections Hsiao-ting Lin; and the Second International Workshop on Japanese Diaspora led, by Research Fellow and Curator for the Japanese Diaspora Collection Kaoru (Kay) Ueda. 
• We resumed our regular book talks, including with Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms on Hitler’s American Gamble; Samuel Clowes Huneke on States Of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship And Democracy In Cold War Germany; and Mark Pomar on Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Highlighting Scholarship and Media Featuring Hoover Collections

In addition to publications by Hoover Fellows, media produced by a fiction writer, a historian, and a journalist have unearthed some of the most intriguing artifacts in the Library & Archives’ collections. 

• “The Captured Baʿthist State Records from the 2003 Iraq War: Repatriation and Retribution?” a Hoover Institution Essay from The Caravan Notebook (2022) by Michael P. Brill, PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Silas Palmer Fellow at Hoover.
• China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) by Frank Dikötter, senior fellow.
• “Hidden Figures: A New History of the Permanent Income Hypothesis,” History of Political Economy 54, S1 (2022): 43–68 (Duke University Press) by Jennifer Burns, research fellow.
• Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War (Hachette Book Group, 2021) by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, former research fellow.
• I Saw the Angel of Death (Hoover Institution Press, 2022) edited by Dr. Maciej Siekierski, former research fellow and curator emeritus of the European collections and Dr. Feliks Tych (1929–2015).
• Mont Pèlerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society (Hoover Institution Press, 2022) by Bruce Caldwell, research professor of economics at Duke and a former distinguished visiting fellow at Hoover.
• Social Change, Industrialization, and the Service Economy in São Paulo 1950–2020 (Stanford University Press, 2022) by Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, research fellow and curator of the Latin American collection.
• Taiwan, the United States, and the Hidden History of the Cold War in Asia: Divided Allies (Routledge, 2022) by Hsiao-ting Lin, research fellow and curator of the Modern China and Taiwan collection.

• Shadows Reel (Penguin Random House, 2022) by C. J. Box features the Julius Streicher photo album (cataloged as Das Jahr 1937 photograph album). 
• Rachel Maddow presents Ultra, an eight-part series podcast, features the papers of Ernest Lundeen.
• Simon Schama's History of Now, a three-part documentary series, features the Pasternak Family papers.

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