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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.
This collection comprises 174,926 scans and is part of Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, which is the result of ongoing cooperation between the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and Brill.
Image caption: Reijn Dirksen, 1950 (US Economic Cooperation Administration, Washington, DC) - Public Domain
The uniqueness of this collection stems from van Stekelenburg’s focus on the individual motivations that induced Dutch people to migrate, his attention to the social composition of Dutch emigrants, to the political reaction of their governments, and to the many organizations that helped them settle in the New World. This collection, indeed, brings in the voices and perspectives of non-state agents and provides further examples of the non-linear processes of assimilation that Dutch migrants had to go through in North America.
Finally, the documents of this collection reveal the emphasis on cultural propaganda, conceived as an effective means to spread a certain range of ideas among a large and well-defined target audience, that characterized the phenomenon of Dutch-Catholic emigration. In doing so, this collection opens the field to further inter- and multi-disciplinary studies on the ways in which Dutch popular media, including radio, the press, and cinema, introduced and framed the numerous possibilities of overseas migration.
This collection comprises 13,081 scans and is part of Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, which is the result of ongoing cooperation between the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and Brill.
Image caption: Author Unknown; Mrs. van Engelen, a Dutch woman packing her stuff before leaving for Holambra, Brazil, 1950 (National Archive, The Hague) - Public Domain
The collection contains correspondence, reports, lists, and pamphlets regarding Dutch immigration to the Americas (mostly in English), as well as correspondence from and about individual immigrants’ experiences (mostly in Dutch).
As with the van Stekelenburg collection, these documents illuminate the complex history of Dutch emigration, expanding traditional narratives chronologically, thematically, and spatially. In particular, the Stallinga-Ganzevoort collection focuses on the lives and choices of emigrants belonging to different Christian denominations (predominantly Protestant) and clarifies the importance of the continuous educational campaigns that Dutch churches were carrying on at home with the aim of training those professional figures whose expertise was needed on the other side of the Atlantic.
At the same time, this collection provides information about Dutch emigrants who decided to settle in such countries as Brazil. In this particular setting, Dutch people encountered different and partly novel problems and could not always rely on pre-existing national networks or communities. For this reason, the collection is especially appealing to those scholars who study global migrations, transnational identities, and cross-cultural exchanges.
This collection comprises 17,011 scans and is part of Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, which is the result of ongoing cooperation between the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and Brill.
Image caption: Daan Noske / Anefo, The trip of four new couples from Schiphol to Canada, 1954 (National Archive, The Hague) - Public Domain
In 1949, the Fulbright Program was set up in the Netherlands as well. In order to better coordinate academic exchanges between the Netherlands and the US, the two countries formally established a bilateral United States Educational Foundation (USEF) in Amsterdam. Since then, that organization has changed its name twice. In 1972, USEF became the Netherlands America Committee for Educational Exchange (NACEE). NACEE in turn became the Fulbright Center in 2004. The documents collected by the USEF, NACEE, and the Fulbright Center are held by the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) in Middelburg. However, due to privacy regulations and classification, the only part of this collection that is digitally available is its Section G.
Section G contains a large variety of historical sources on the foundation and development of the NACEE and the Fulbright Center, including speeches by and on Senator Fulbright, papers related to an earlier exchange organization, the Netherland-America Foundation, and personal recollections of alumni. Section G is therefore the perfect starting point for any research aimed at discovering the historical development of such a relevant cultural program.
This collection comprises 6,848 scans and is part of Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, which is the result of ongoing cooperation between the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and Brill.
Image caption: Joop van Bilsen / Anefo, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and prince Bernhard receive the US Senator J. William Fulbright and his wife in Baarn, Utrecht, 1964 (Nationaal Archief, The Hague) - CC0
Spanning more than four hundred years, The Guatemala Collection: Government and Church Documents for Sacatepéquez (1587-1991) concentrates primarily on the national era, particularly 1824-1948. The vast majority of the documents—correspondence, annual reports, statistics, letters, litigation—found within The Guatemala Collection are copies from the Archivo General de Centroamérica and the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano “Francisco de Paula García Peláez” (formerly known as Archivo Eclesiástico de Guatemala) in Guatemala City. In recent years, the latter has seldom been opened to the public. Colonial documents mainly come from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. A few of the documents and transcripts come from the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) in Antigua. In general, the documents are organized by place, theme, and chronology.
The Guatemala Collection comprises ten series. Eight of the series are titled after the department or municipality to which the documents correspond. The remaining two series—Colonial Documents and Secondary Sources—are titled descriptively. Although they also present findings and information concerning Sacatepéquez and its municipalities, for reasons of chronology and the nature of the documents, these series have been set apart from the main collection. The secondary source documents, which were authored primarily by the donor and historian Christopher Lutz, scholar and researcher Héctor Concohá, historian Wendy Kramer, and anthropologist Sheldon Annis, are notes, commentaries, descriptions, indexes, syntheses, and analyses of materials included in the collection itself or from the archives. Across these ten series, the documents of the collection are organized into fifty-seven distinct classifications that include such themes as economy, agriculture, forced labor, complaints, crime, annual reports, natural disasters, municipal affairs, education, elections, military, public works, religion, public health, lands and estates, development, resignations and solicitations, regulations, festivities, and maps. The majority of the documents are labeled by Concohá as to their years and subject matter.
Although Lutz initially was explicit in his research requests, after his exile from Guatemala in 1980, the project took on a life of its own as Concohá continuously widened the parameters of the research. Consequently, The Guatemala Collection houses a rich array of government, church, and civil documents that bear testimony to an indigenous population’s struggle and success with the changing social, economic, political, and religious dynamics of colonial and independent rule.
Image artwork: Caroline Salvin, Dueñas de la puerta de la casa, octubre de 1873 (Dueñas from the house door, October 1873; watercolor)
This online collection contains all issues of the leftist newsletter The Week, edited and published by Claud Cockburn between 1933-1946. Over 600 issues (3,559 pages) are available as full-text searchable PDFs.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong in the 1930s, but one extremely cynical observer of the world at its worst was usually right on the essentials, even if he did tend to err on the side of hyperbole. That man was 'the journalist’s journalist’, Claud Cockburn, who left The Times of London in 1933 to found, edit and write The Week, a closely informed, extraordinarily prescient newsletter that serves both as a roadmap through the 1930s and served its contemporaries as a warning of the horrors in store.
From Whitehall to Kasumigaseki to the Kremlin - some said from the Kremlin. From Cliveden to the Commons to the Reichstag, Claud Cockburn’s The Week brewed a potent mixture of informed gossip and brutal fact from a network of concerned diplomatic, military and journalistic insiders gathered during his years on The Times of London and on the far left.
Cockburn, Beijing born and the son of a British diplomat, took the pulse of the 1930s and gave his diagnosis in The Week. As he saw it, the clouds of war were gathering and no amount of appeasement would see them off, and few disagreed. Typed up, mimeographed and stapled in a dingy London attic, Claud Cockburn's brown-buff coloured six-page weekly was initially mailed to no more than a few thousand subscribers, but from its first issue of 29 March 1933 its influence soon grew out of all proportion to its circulation.
By its 4th edition in late April 1933, the circulation of The Week had not only trebled; it had become essential reading in the London bureau of every national daily and news agency in the world. The subscription list included the legations and embassies of every nation represented in London and soon in Washington, and would soon extend to Tokyo and Nanjin. In the City of London, The Week’s subscribers included all the major British banks and merchant banks, and the representative foreign banks of mercantile powers the world over.
For all its casual amateurishness, its snickering asides and shoestring budget, The Week told the movers and players of its day exactly how little they thought of each other, exposing the fairweather alliances of the 1930s and the utter futility of gentlemanly undertakings. Dismissed, denied and praised to the skies as much by its contemporaries as by its successors, Claud Cockburn's The Week is as essential reading in our day as it was in its heyday.
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:
- Dutch-American Diplomatic Relations Online, 1784-1973
- The Fulbright Archives Online, 1949-2016 (excerpts): Papers of the Dutch-American Fulbright Program
- Dutch-Catholic Immigration to the Americas Online: The Henk van Stekelenburg Collection, 1820-1960
- Dutch-Protestant Immigration to the Americas Online: The Stallinga-Ganzevoort Collection, 1890-1960
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.