This collection consists of official Dutch-American diplomatic correspondence covering the period from 1784 to 1973. Taken together, the documents of this collection help scholars to shed further light on some of the most important watersheds in both European and American history and clarify the historical evolution of transatlantic relations from Thomas Jefferson to the end of the Bretton Woods System.
The collection chiefly contains State Department’s instructions to US diplomats and consuls dispatched in the Netherlands as well as letters, reports, recommendations, dossiers, and memos compiled by American diplomats posted in The Hague and across the whole Dutch colonial empire. The documents cover a broad range of topics including political, economic, and military relations, trade policies, migration, cultural and religious exchanges, and transnational social issues such as civil rights, pacifism, environmentalism, labor relations, and human rights.
A large part of the collection focuses on the post-1945 era and comprises papers on the development and execution of the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands, on the future of the Dutch colonial empire, and on the development of post-war European and Dutch politics. The postwar dispatches from The Hague are indeed an extremely useful source through which to read the evolution of the European integration process, the building of a transatlantic security community, the organization of concerted anti-communist activities, and the reactions to the emergence of a widespread anti-American sentiment in Europe in coincidence with the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Project Adviser Dario Fazzi,
Roosevelt Institute for American Studies
Scholars and students of cultural and public diplomacy, political and economic relations, migration flows, cross-cultural exchanges, the role of religion in foreign policy making, and American political, cultural, and economic hegemony in Europe.
Project adviser
Dario Fazzi is Research Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies. His main field of study is US and Cold War history, with a particular focus on public diplomacy and transnational movements. His works and reviews on nuclear cultures, peace movements, youth protests, and transatlantic crossings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, international collections, and edited volumes. He is the author of
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Anti-Nuclear Movement: The Voice of Conscience, a systematic account of the former first lady and UN representative’s involvement in the first ban-the-bomb campaign of the Cold War. Dr. Fazzi teaches history courses at several Dutch universities, where he lectures on the US, the Cold War, and transatlantic relations. He is also project assistant for Leiden University’s Massive Open Online Course
The Rooseveltian Century(Coursera).