Resources for 19th Century and 20th Century Research
Official Documents of the Foreign and Colonial Offices from the UK Archives
- Foreign Office Files for the Middle EastForeign Office Files for the Middle East, 1971-1981 is a collection of primary sources from the UK’s National Archives, including analyses, annual reviews and diplomatic correspondence, on topics such as the Arab-Israel and Iran-Iraq wars, as well as civil conflicts in Lebanon, Iran, Cyprus and Yemen. Collection still being digitized as of 2016
- Confidential Print Africa, 1834-1966Confidential Print: Africa is a digitized collection of primary source documents, part of the British Government’s series Confidential Print. Documents from the Foreign and Colonial Offices stamped “Confidential Print” were then printed and shared with officials from the Foreign Office, Cabinet, and heads of British missions abroad. Documents have been digitized from files held by the UK National Archives, Kew.
- Confidential Print: Middle East, 1839-1969Confidential Print: Middle East is a digitized collection of primary source documents, part of the British Government’s series Confidential Print. Documents from the Foreign and Colonial Offices stamped “Confidential Print” were then printed and shared with officials from the Foreign Office, Cabinet, and heads of British missions abroad. Documents have been digitized from files held by the UK National Archives, Kew.
- Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980This digitized primary source collection draws from British Foreign Office files and contains a wide variety of formats including diplomatic dispatches, telegrams, newspaper cuttings and transcripts, maps, photographs, political and economic reports, accounts of visits and tours, minutes of meetings, conference proceedings, letters, leaflets and other ephemera focused on India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, but also covering Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Kashmir. The collection is organized into three sections: Independence, Partition and the Nehru Era, 1947-1964; South Asian Conflicts and Independence for Bangladesh, 1965-1971; and Afghanistan and the Cold War, Emergency Rule in India, and the Resumption of Civil Rule in Pakistan, 1972-1980.
Rockerfeller Foundation Archive
- Rockerfeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Archive Center has created this website to tell the story of the Foundation’s first hundred years, drawing on primary documents, photographs and film. The documents you will find on this site represent a fraction of the records held at the Archive Center. We invite you to explore the work of one of America’s oldest philanthropies as it confronted global and domestic challenges in health, agriculture, education, and many other fields.
United States Diplomatic Post Records
- Confidential U.S. Diplomatic Post Records, Middle East, 1925-1941: IraqContains significant source material on Iraq during the period of persistent turmoil from 1925 through 1941. Among other important subjects, the collection documents cast light on the termination of the British mandate in 1932, establishment of the Iraqi parliament, granting of the first oil concessions to a consortium of oil companies, turbulent series of military coups between 1936 and 1941, and defeat of Rashid Ali al Ghailani's pro-Axis government by the British in 1941, which assured the Allied Powers of oil supplies from Iraq during World War II.
- Confidential U.S. Diplomatic Post Records, Middle East, 1942-1944: IraqThe collection encompasses approximately 9,000 pages arranged within 272 folders, mostly of a few pages, arranged chronologically and further by broad administrative category or subject area within 27 series.
- Confidential U.S. Diplomatic Post Records, Middle East, 1925-1941: IranContains significant material on political conditions, social and economic developments, and foreign relations in Iran from the assumption of the title of Shah by Reza Khan in 1925 to the invasion and occupation of Iran by Great Britain and the Soviet Union in August and September 1941.
- Confidential U.S. Diplomatic Post Records, Middle East, 1942-1944: IranThe collection encompasses approximately 15,000 pages arranged within 362 folders arranged chronologically and further, within 25 series, by broad administrative category or subject area.
- U.S. diplomatic post records, 1914-1945 Other CountriesDiplomatic post records contain the incoming messages from Washington, retained copies of outgoing dispatches, locally gathered information, and background material on decision making. The following countries or cities are represented in this module: Japan; Cuba; El Salvador; Honduras; Nicaragua; Iran; Iraq; Beirut; Jerusalem; Aden; Lebanon; Russia and the Soviet Union.
Other historical and current (to 1993) publications
- Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural ExchangeThis archive will enable students and scholars to examine a selection of records that constitute a political and social history of Western interaction with a number of Asian countries during the nineteenth century. Most of the manuscript collections in this archive consist of the British Foreign Office and United States consular and diplomatic records. These records were generally maintained in the local consular or diplomatic posts and reflect the day-to-day accounting of the activities of the indigenous populations and their national governments, the expansion of trade, and the exercise of extraterritorial rights and treaty provisions. In addition, a selection of missionary correspondence and journals has been included, as missionaries usually provided some of the earliest contact in various Asian locales with Western ideals.
- Middle East & North Africa: Global Perspectives, 1958-1994The documents in this collection were sourced from international journals, newspapers, scientific reports, and radio and television broadcasts from 19 countries in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as from other nations with security interests in the region. A division of the Central Intelligence Agency identified, curated and translated the documents into English every day for four decades.
Tips for Searching the Official Documents of the Foreign and Colonial Offices
Sample keywords: project, aid, fund
Tips for searching these collections:
Choose the geographic area you are interested in. Click on Advanced search in the upper right hand corner of the screen. In the Advanced Search, change where it will search from "Keywords anywhere" to "Title," type in your keywords, such as project or aid or fund. If you would like to search in all three collection, click on the drop down menu under "Collection" and choose the 3 collections: Confidential Print: Africa, Confidential Print: Middle East, and Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980 and APPLY. You can also add in a date range, if you wish, but you might narrow your results too much! Also click in the box that says "Primary Documents" and click on Search.
When you pull up an individual docuement, you will be given the option to search it full-text, in the command ribbon above the information about the documents. You have other options there too, including downloading the document into a PDF and Citation/Export where you can choose Chicago and just copy and paste the information for citing the document!
Above the command ribbon, you will see thumbnails of the individual pages and see the whole page by clicking on it and seeing it in their image viewer.
A chronology and an interactive map are also available. When viewing the chronology, be sure to choose the collection you want (we don't get all that are listed).
