History

                                                                                  Return to History Collections

                                                                                  Return to American & British History

Declassified Documents Reference System
Digital facsimiles of more than 70,000 documents released by presidential libraries and relating to major domestic and international events of the post-World War II era. These fulltext government documents come from the C.I.A., F.B.I., State Department, White House, and other U.S. governmental agencies, and were written by or for presidents, senators, and congress members. All were classified at one time; some were top secret. The documents reveal what was censored and what was left in.
The database ranges from the years immediately following World War II, when declassified documents were first made widely available, through the 1970s. Nearly every major foreign and domestic event of these years is covered: the Cold War, Vietnam, foreign policy shifts, the civil rights movement, and others.

YOU CAN SEARCH BY:
            Name, Country, or Event:
                Examples: Lee Harvey Oswald, Martin Luther King, Kruschev, Castro,
                Iranian revolution, Cuban missile crisis, Berlin blockade, Arab-lsraeli
                wars, Kennedy assassinations, biological research, chemical warfare,
                drug trafficking, immigration, Haiti, Panama, Vietnam, Pakistan, Peru,
                People's Republic of China
            Type of Document:
                Examples: correspondence, memoranda to minutes of cabinet meetings,
                technical studies, national security policy statements, intelligence reports
            Other:
                issue date, source institution, classification level, date declassified,
                sanitation, completeness, number of pages, document number
You can view, print out, download.

Explanation of classification levels:
"Executive Order 12958 preserves the three classification levels of
Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret that have long served as the
foundation for protecting classified information. While elements of the
definitions of these three levels have varied over time-Executive Order
12958, for instance, is the first to require classifiers to be able to
"identify and describe" the damage to national security if the
information were disclosed-they have remained based on the concept
of "damage" since the 1950s. If the unauthorized disclosure of the
information could potentially cause damage, it may be classified as
Confidential; Secret if "serious damage;" or Top Secret if
"exceptionally grave damage." Most classifiers employ the middle
option; 71 percent of all classified information is Secret; only 20
percent and 9 percent of all classified information is Confidential and
Top Secret, respectively."
          ---"Rethinking Classification: Better Protection and Greater Openness."
          http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/index.html
           Adobe Acrobat Reader required.

Return to History Collections                 Return to American & British History
8/2004
C. Barnes

		Hours \| Ask a Librarian \| Online Requests \| Remote Logon
		Library Catalog \| Databases \| Site Map \| Help \| Search