On August 22 Hoover research fellow Elizabeth Cobbs delivered a talk based on her research on the First World War Women’s Signal Corps, the first female unit in the United States Army, as part of the Library & Archives’ ongoing History & Policy lecture series. Cobbs is the author of the recent book The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, for which she conducted research in the collections at Hoover.

Lieutenant Commander Leonard Leos, representing the US Navy in the 2016–17 class of national security affairs fellows, recently completed a survey on US-China policy in an important group whose opinions have been largely unexplored: Foreign Service and naval officers with experience in East Asia or the Indo-Pacific region.

The fifth annual Hoover Institution Workshop on Modern China, entitled “Crossing the 1949 Divide: The Hoover Archives and Contemporary Chinese History,” was held during July 31 and August 4, 2017. Co-organized and cosponsored with the Seminar of East Asian Studies, Free University of Berlin, this year the workshop featured seven speakers from the United States, Germany, Austria, and Taiwan who explored Hoover’s unique modern China collections and evaluated how these historical treasures help reshape our understanding of contemporary China and post-1949 Taiwan. Workshop attendees presented their research to over three hundred audience from the Hoover/Stanford community as well as to researchers and mass media in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Hoover Library & Archives have acquired two photo albums of Stefano Braccio, a lieutenant in the engineer combat battalion of the Italian Expeditionary Corps participating in the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa).  The albums provide a complete visual record of his unit’s operation in the Ukraine, from the crossing of the Soviet frontier in July 1941 to the end of Italian troops’ participation on the Eastern Front in February 1943, after the Axis forces’ defeat at Stalingrad.