Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies
The
Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) is an archive, public library, research center, and graduate school based in Middelburg, the Netherlands. Established in 1986 as the Roosevelt Study Center and completely renovated in 2017, the RIAS’s mission is to foster the study of American history in Europe, to facilitate research on the history of American politics, culture, and society, and to explore the historical development and trajectories of Dutch-American and, generally, transatlantic relations. The RIAS carries out such a mission under its motto “Pursuing the Rooseveltian Century,” which means that it supports academic research investigating the evolution of American society and its institutional settings, the changing nature of the relationship between the US government and its citizenry, the consolidation of modern political leadership, the evolution of American diplomacy and empire, and the performative roles played domestically and internationally by such ideas as freedom, security, and equality.
The RIAS holds hundreds of thousands of documents that help scholars and students at any level to investigate the complexity of American history. The RIAS collections focus on a variety of issues, such as civil rights, national security, intelligence, propaganda, radicalism, religion, and diplomacy. Collected over more than thirty years, these documents include presidential papers, personal correspondence and oral histories, departmental files, NGO records, diaries, memoires, historical periodicals, and journals.
In order to make its materials available to a larger audience, the RIAS, in cooperation with Brill, has recently started digitizing some of its most prominent holdings. Organized into the expanding online archival family
Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and comprising, in this initial iteration, more than 200,000 scans, the digital archive currently consists of four different collections:
Together, these collections provide unique insights into the history of Dutch-American relations, the development of transatlantic cultural programs, and the history of Dutch and European migration to North America. They are of particular interest to scholars working on cultural and public diplomacy, political and economic relations, migration flows, cross-cultural exchanges, the role of religion in foreign policy making, and the attractiveness of and resistance to 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).
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.