Scanned Documents
When I was
doing research for the Constructed Peace book
in the 1980s and 1990s, I had to photocopy a great mass of archival
material. That material—about 11,000
pages of documents from American, British, and French archives—I’ve now
scanned, and the scanned pdf’s are available here. They deal mostly with the issues I was
concerned with in that book—namely, the German question and the nuclear
question (especially the question of the nuclear defense of Europe) in the
1945-63 period.
The scanned
pdf’s, moreover, have been OCR’d and are therefore keyword searchable. But the originals were sometimes scarcely
legible (4th carbon copies, etc.) and sometimes the OCR software
misses many keywords.
The
photocopies I collected were originally organized in a very simple way. The collection was broken down into three
parts: U.S. documents (80%), British
documents (14%), and French documents (6%).
For ease of filing, the U.S. material was in addition divided into two
parts: regular-size documents and
oversize documents. Within each of those
divisions the documents were filed in simple chronological order. (The date of the document, which I used as
the document identifer, is generally in the upper right-hand corner of the
first page.) In the pdf’s I’m posting
here, the documents are organized in exactly that same way. The documents appear in chronological
order. Occasionally a document might be
slightly out of place, but generally not by much—that is, not by more than a
day or two. Partly this is due to the
fact that the notes of a meeting might have been prepared a day or two after
the meeting itself took place, and I was not perfectly consistent about which
of the two dates—the date of the meeting or the date at which the notes were
prepared—the document was filed under.
Sometimes
more than one copy of a document may appear in the pdf’d files. This is generally because these are variant
versions of the same document—that is, versions that were declassified
differently at various times or by various repositories—and I was particularly
interested in seeing which passages had been viewed as too sensitive to
declassify at one point or another.
The
documents, moreover, were frequently marked up by me. Some of the scanned documents are
incomplete—I copied, say, a two- or three-page extract from a much longer
document (partly because the cost of xeroxing used to be quite
substantial). The fact that the copy is
just an extract from a longer document is generally noted on the source note I
wrote on the document.
That note
about where the original document came from was generally, but not always, put
at the bottom of the first page of the document. In giving the source I used abbreviations
extensively. For a discussion of the
system I used, indicating which abbreviations were used for this purpose, see
the “Sources and Bibliography” section at the end of the book. You do not have to use the hard copy for this
purpose. It can also be found on pp.
939-952 in the original, unedited version of the book which is now available
online (http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/ConstructedPeaceMS.docx).
References to documents from the old Declassified Documents Reference
System microfiche collection are given by date of DDRS release plus DDRS
document number for that year (e.g., 1986/2237); those documents, however, can generally be
found today without too much trouble on the DDRS website (UCLA link: http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/DDRS?ste=2&locID=uclosangeles), by, for example, doing a full text
search for some phrase from the document.
When there
is no note about the source for the document at the bottom of the first page,
the source can generally be found elsewhere on that page. In the case of British documents, the class
and piece number were automatically included at the top of the page when those
documents were photocopied, and most of them are still there. Documents from the U.S. State Department
Central (or Decimal) Files have the file number stamped on them, generally on
the right-hand side of the page. Some
documents I got from friends of mine like Bob Wampler; sometimes they are followed by a note or
letter to me telling what the source is.
The sources for the French documents are evidently no longer accurate,
since the filing system for the French Foreign Ministry archives was changed
after I did my archival research in Paris in 1990-91, but a concordance table
should be available at that archive.
The
collection posted here is pretty thin for the early years of the Cold War, when
I was able to rely heavily on the published diplomatic documents. Many of the documents I used for the later
chapters of the book were only available in the archives at the time I was
doing my research, although they often were published subsequently.
The
following is a linked list of the pdf’d files comprising the collection:
U.S. Documents:
British Documents:
French Documents: