In 2025, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives advanced its longstanding mission to collect, preserve, and make available the most important material on war, revolution, and peace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Guided by Herbert Hoover’s vision that the Institution must “recall the voice of experience against the making of war” and serve as a resource for the pursuit of peace, the Library & Archives continued to safeguard historical materials, expand access to knowledge, and promote curiosity across generations. Below are a few key accomplishments and activities from this year.
NEW COLLECTIONS
Throughout the year, curators at the Library & Archives traveled globally as well as locally to acquire rare materials that align with the mission of the Hoover Institution. Thanks to their dedication, we acquired more than sixty new collections and over one hundred increments to existing collections. Those that follow are among the many fascinating new items in our holdings:
William F. Buckley’s Typewriter
Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley (1925–2008), donated the typewriter that “launched the modern conservative movement,” among other materials, to the Library & Archives. In an interview with Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge, Christopher said he thought his father “would be pleased that [the typewriter] is going somewhere it will be loved and taken good care of.” This physical artifact of intellectual engagement and democratic debate is currently on display in the Library & Archives reading room at the Hoover Institution.
Jack T. Young Papers
Born in Kona, Hawaii, Jack T. Young (1910–2000) led a life that spanned continents, conflicts, and causes. His collection follows an extraordinary path from explorer to soldier, from mediator to military advisor, and includes his service in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist (Kuomintang) Army followed by service in the US Army during WWII and the Korean and Vietnam wars. These personal writings, photographs, reports, clippings, films, and maps broaden our knowledge about China before the 1949 Communist takeover and of the United States in the twentieth century.
Ernest Kellerman Papers
Captain Ernest Kellermann, born in 1893, joined the Bogdan Khmel’nitskii guerrilla unit under Colonel Slepsinskii and then served in the Soviet Army as it entered Czechoslovakia. His papers document the operations of the Bogdan Khmel'nitskii guerrilla force in Slovakia during the final months of the Second World War. These materials, together with a handmade typescript issued in February 1944 by the Osipovichi Underground Union of Communist Youth of Belarus entitled Uchis’ u nikh bit’ vraga (Learn from them how to defeat the enemy), shed new light on how local fighters resisted Axis forces and how their experiences were recorded, remembered, and contested in the historical record.
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
In 2025, the Library & Archives’ on-site digital imaging team captured almost 150,000 images and supported the digitization of materials from twenty-eight unique collections. This work continues to enable researchers and the public to access historical records from anywhere online. We invite you to browse our digital collections portal, which saw upwards of 19 million pages added last year across the Afghan Partisan Serials, Global Press Archive, Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, and Russia Abroad Digital Collection.
Gerd Heidemann Collection Tapes
In commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the Library & Archives released 879 digitized audio recordings and transcripts of conversations relating to twentieth-century conflict—most notably, undercover conversations with high-ranking Nazis who had fled to South America. The acquisition of this collection was led by Hoover Research Fellow and Taube Family Curator for European Collections Katharina Friedla with support by Hoover Visiting Fellow and University of Aberdeen Professor Thomas Weber. The newly released and never-before-heard recordings comprise only a fraction of the enormous Gerd Heidemann collection, which includes over 7,300 binders of archival material and more than 100,000 photographs.
Reformatted Harold M. Agnew Footage
Eighty years have passed since the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harold Agnew (1921–2013), a young physicist with the Manhattan Project, participated in the first atomic strike mission and donated his materials to the Library & Archives in 1980. The collection contains a film that captured views of North Field on Tinian Island in the Mariana Islands; scenes of The Great Artiste and its crew after their return from the Hiroshima mission; footage of the Enola Gay; and images captured en route to Nagasaki. This important record is now available in higher resolution in the Library & Archives' Digital Collections.
Russia Abroad Digital Collection Achievement
The Library & Archives launched the Russia Abroad Digital Collection (RADC) in November 2024 and this year celebrated a major milestone: more than one million pages from nearly six hundred Russian émigré newspapers published and available worldwide through its open-access platform. The RADC project’s long-term goal is to ensure that the global Russian émigré press is comprehensively preserved and accessible for scholars, students, and the public for generations to come. In its first year, the project has already reshaped the study of the Russian diaspora by removing longstanding barriers to access.
Japanese Diaspora Initiative Developments
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection remains the world’s largest open-access, online archive of Japanese-language newspapers published outside of Japan during the imperial period. Now, it includes the full run of Hawaii Hochi and its English-language counterpart, the Hawaii Herald. This milestone follows a collaborative effort with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s Hamilton Library and Hawaii Hochi Ltd.’s parent company, Shizuoka Shinbun. This new digital collection provides a window into the history of the Japanese diaspora, transpacific migration, and the evolution of civil liberties and community identity in Hawai‘i.
SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH
A vibrant community of scholars, students, and independent researchers visited the Library & Archives in 2025 to research our collections and meet with our curators. This year, we also celebrated two landmark scholarly achievements. Benjamin Nathans received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press), which drew extensively on Hoover’s unrivaled Soviet dissident collections. And Hoover Research Fellow Jennifer Burns received the 2025 Age of Reagan Conference Book Prize for Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a work that relied heavily on the papers of Milton Friedman preserved at Hoover.
Workshops
The annual Hoover Institution Workshop on Modern China and Taiwan, organized by Research Fellow and Curator Hsiao-ting Lin, took place during the summer. The workshop featured experts who explored the Hoover Library & Archives’ historic holdings on China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This year, five speakers from North America, Singapore, and Australia shared their research findings with an audience of attendees from Stanford University and beyond. Hoover Fellow Matthew Lowenstein presented his research on loans and lenders in China’s late imperial and republican-era lending markets.
Selected Publications Featuring Hoover Collections
- Joseph Torigian’s The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
Book Talk Event
Published as part of the Stanford-Hoover Series on Authoritarianism, The Party's Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping's father, written in English. Drawing on a wealth of materials, including the Li Rui papers, Research Fellow Joseph Torigian tells the story of how the elder Xi’s involvement in the Red Army and economic political reform, working alongside Zhou Enlai and dealing with ethnic minorities and organized religion—plus years of political exile after running afoul of Maoist sensibilities—all play into how his son runs the modern-day Chinese Communist Party.
- Daniel Flynn’s The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer
Book Talk Event
The Man Who Invented Conservatism unveils one of the twentieth century’s great untold stories: a Communist turned conservative, an antiwar activist turned soldier, and a free-love enthusiast turned family man whose big idea captured the American Right. Present at the creation of National Review, Meyer helped launch Joan Didion’s writing career. From H. G. Wells to Henry Kissinger to Milton Friedman, he rubbed shoulders with everyone who mattered. Visiting Fellow Daniel Flynn relied on the papers of not only Frank Meyer but also James Burnham and Raymond Morley, preserved at the Library & Archives, to trace Meyer’s fascinating path.
- Lev Dobriansky’s Unyielding Resolve: Captive Nations and the Path to Freedom
Lev E. Dobriansky (1918–2008), a diplomat and economics professor at Georgetown University and Truman-Reagan Medal awardee, penned the Captive Nations Week and Shevchenko Monument resolutions and cofounded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Unyielding Resolve, a memoir released by Hoover Press in partnership with the Library & Archives, uses Dobriansky’s original manuscripts along with correspondence—including with pilot and businesswoman Jacqueline Cochran and former US presidents—documenting grassroots and diplomatic efforts to challenge Soviet domination.
- Samuel Helfont’s The Iraq Wars: A Very Short Introduction
Visiting Fellow Samuel Helfont argues that the Gulf War of 1991, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the campaign against the Islamic State beginning in 2014 each had their own logic, yet cannot be considered in isolation. The Iraq War unleashed resistance, civil war, insurgency, and eventually the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Thus, following the Gulf War, each war was fought to finish the previous conflict. Helfont posits that the Iraq Wars are therefore best understood as a chain of events. Until now, no short and easily digestible volume existed to synthesize the vast English and Arabic sources on the conflicts. The Iraq Wars uses material from the Conflict Records Research Center held at the Library & Archives.
EDUCATION AND OUTREACH
The Library & Archives creates and displays exhibitions, hosts events, and engages those interested in studying the past. This year, a new class and group visit request form streamlined the visitor experience. Explore a few highlights from hands-on educational offerings in 2025:
Exhibitions
The Battalion Artist: A Sailor's Journey Through the South Seas (September 2024–August 2025) traced the wartime experience of Natale Bellantoni, a gifted artist and member of the United States Navy “Seabees,” the vital construction battalions that were formed after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Watercolor paintings, sketchbooks, photographs, letters, and other wartime ephemera, along with posters and other materials from Hoover’s renowned World War II collections, were among the items on display. The Hoover Tower and exhibition galleries welcomed more than 39,000 visitors in 2025.
The Sowell Legacy: Ideas, Impact, and Intellectual Freedom conference in October 2025 was enriched by a Library & Archives pop-up exhibition of Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell’s personal photographs and many volumes of his books in multiple languages. This temporary display helped to celebrate a lifetime of fearless inquiry, principled scholarship, and contributions that have shaped generations of thinkers and policymakers.
Online Exhibitions and Stories
This year, there were almost 130,000 virtual visits to the Library & Archives’ online exhibitions and stories. Three new features, cowritten by Research Fellow and Curator for the Japanese Diaspora Collections Kay Ueda and her colleague Hiromi Okazawa, offer a window into the experience of Japanese Americans from the 1890s to today. In them, readers can find reference to historic materials held at Hoover and elsewhere to explore neighborhoods, discover businesses and schools, and trace the roots of community members.
Stanford Student Coursework
Renewed for its second year, War, Revolution, and Peace: The View from Hoover Tower introduced a new cohort of Stanford students to the history, collections, and operations of the Library & Archives. Sponsored by the International Relations Program and led by Research Fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude, the class saw the full enrollment and participation of forty-four students. In 2025, guest speakers included Research Fellow and Curator for North American Collections Jean Cannon, who presented on Hoover’s renowned poster collection.
High School Student Programming
The inaugural History Skills Academy, launched with the Hoover History Lab and The Concord Review, brought twenty-five high school students to Stanford’s campus for an intensive and immersive workshop centered on primary source research using Hoover collections. Through this program, students encountered history as evidence and were invited to inquire, interpret, and discover the past. Individualized attention and support from expert staff at the Library & Archives helped to enhance their research skills for years to come.
Reflections from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives Season 1
The Library & Archives completed the first season of its Reflections video series in 2025. This signature video series features curators, fellows, and researchers who help to reveal the historical significance of key materials. This year, Reflections reached more than 1.57 million viewers, furthering Hoover’s mission to bring archival insight to a global audience.
Flagship Events
- Archives Uncovered: Revealing the Third Reich and the Inner Lives of Extremists
This panel discussion delved into Gerd Heidemann’s 1979 journey to South America, during which he interviewed members of the Third Reich’s inner circle who fled there. It also featured the interview conducted with Heidemann a few weeks before his death in December 2024, during which he spoke for the first time about the involvement of Western intelligence in his journey to South America. The panelists, which included Research Fellow and Taube Family Curator for European Collections Katharina Friedla, Visiting Fellow Thomas Weber, and film director Foeke de Koe, returned for a corresponding event in spring 2025 to screen The Barbie Tapes, the first film to feature the recently digitized audio tapes from the collection.
- Journey Through Hoover’s Past and Present: The Origin and Operations of the Library & Archives
On April 22, 1919, Herbert Hoover sent a telegram to Stanford University, offering $50,000 to “collect historical material on war.” This fateful wire detailing his personal contribution, together with its instructions, laid the foundations for what has become the leading repository of knowledge on war, revolution, and peace. This event offered an exclusive tour of the spaces that support the collection, preservation, and accessibility of nearly one million books and more than six thousand archival collections from 171 countries.
- Fragmented Visions: Civil War China in Lost Films by American Jesuit Missionaries
The Hoover Institution Program on the US, China, and the World partnered with the Library & Archives in February 2025 for a film screening and talk that brought to light recently recovered color documentary films of China made by American Jesuit missionaries during 1947 and 1948. Drawing from footage he discovered and digitized with the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, speaker Joseph W. Ho explored how these films captured perceptions of both missionary filmmakers and Chinese participants, representing hopes for the survival of communities soon to be torn apart by regional and global conflict.
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