The Hoover Institution hosted its fiftieth retreat, beginning on Sunday, October 21, 2012, and ending on Tuesday, October 23, 2012. On Sunday, the Honorable Bob McDonnell, governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia since January 2010 who also currently chairs the Republican Governors’ Association, the Southern Growth Policies Board, and the Southern Regional Education Board, gave the before-dinner remarks. His topics included job creation, economic development, our current debt crisis, and deficit spending. He also touched on two competing visions in the world; the first, which he calls an “entitlement society” with more guarantees, more taxes, more spending, and more regulation as a way to promote success; the second, an “opportunity society” which individuals can work hard, dream big, and use all their talents to be successful with limited government interference.

Just in time for the opening of the baseball season, sound recordings of speeches by legendary baseball managers, executives, and journalists from Hoover’s Commonwealth Club of California collection are now digitized and available to researchers. The collection features such heavy hitters as Bob Lurie, Tony La Russa, Dusty Baker, and Billy Beane.

Theresa Berger, a graduate student in Library & Information Science concentrating in Archival Studies, reflects on a year working in Hoover Archives.

Professor Eriks Jekabsons of the University of Latvia, a historian who has worked at the Hoover Institution several times during the past decade, has written an 800-page monograph on relations between Latvia and the United States, with special emphasis on the American aid to that country during 1918−22. The publication is based mostly on documentation found in the Hoover Archives and is richly illustrated with photographs from Hoover holdings.