Foreign Relations of the United States

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About Foreign Relations of the United States

This digital facsimile of Foreign Relations of the United States is a project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries. This is an incomplete run from 1861-1960 with missing volumes being added as they can be acquired and processed. If your library is interested in donating material for this project, please contact the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.

Special thanks are owed to the University of Chicago Libraries for contributing FRUS volumes for digitization. Thanks also to these other contributing libraries: Southwestern University (Los Angeles) Library, the University of Connecticut's Homer Babbidge Library, Georgia Southwestern State University's James Earl Carter Library, and the University of Indiana-Bloomington Libraries.

The objective of the project is to drive down the cost of digitization and scale up production of valuable information resources in digital format. It is hoped that the development of low-cost digitization methods will inspire further collaboration among research libraries to enlarge the public domain of knowledge accessible via the Internet.

The Foreign Relations of the United States series is the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions that have been declassified and edited for publication. The series is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian and printed volumes are available from the Government Printing Office.

FRUS begins with the administration of Abraham Lincoln in 1861. There are two cumulative indexes covering 1861-1899 and 1900-1918. The organization of FRUS is generally chronological, but the dates of the volumes do not necessarily reflect the dates of documentary history. For example, the volumes for 1900-1918 do not include the records dealing with World War I or the Russian Revolution. Each volume has a subject and author index. There is also typically a table of sources and abbreviations at the beginning of each volume.

Many volumes published since 1945 are available online on the State Department website that is maintained by the University of Illinois at Chicago. A full description of Foreign Relations of the United States, including a listing of the online FRUS volumes, is available from the Office of the Historian website.

Questions or comments about the site should be directed to the Universtiy of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center, University of Wisconsin Libraries.

Credits

Source volume location and acquisition: Beth Harper

Data modeling: Peter Gorman, Mark Foster

Data building and image processing: Mark Foster

Interface programming: Peter Gorman

Technical Note

Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):

• Hand-written texts;
• Texts that contain diacritics;
• Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
• Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
• Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.