Acquisitions on a Grand Scale

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-121
Author(s):  
Kathy Peiss
Keyword(s):  
National Interest ◽  
Industrial Scale ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
American Military ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
War Department ◽  
Research Institutes ◽  
American Research

After the war, the new Librarian of Congress Luther Evans worked with State and War Department officials on a plan to send library agents to Europe. The agents would acquire every book published in Germany and occupied countries and distribute them to American research libraries. The Library of Congress Mission to Europe was a unique collecting effort that acquired 1.5 million books, periodicals, and other materials. Initially a book-purchasing plan, it evolved into an industrial-scale acquisitions program under the American military government in Germany. It seized works from research institutes, specialized libraries, and Nazi collections, helped US Army document centers screen confiscated works, and acquired materials deemed to have no intelligence value. In its short existence, the mission embodied a new commitment among American research libraries, that large international collections were necessary to serve the national interest.

scholarly journals Grants and Acquisitions

2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 244
Author(s):  
Ann-Christe Galloway
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
American Research ◽  
National Effort

The Library of Congress has received a $540,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to evaluate the physical health of the national collection of books in American research libraries and to guide their archive retention and preservation decisions. Since there currently is no objective formula to assess the condition of millions of books in the custody of the nation’s libraries, this scientific study will help inform best practices and provide a baseline for libraries to analyze their print collections based on established scientific guidelines. This is the first effort of its kind to lay the scientific groundwork for the development of a national effort to preserve the corpus of books held in American libraries.

Not a Library, but a Large Depot of Loot

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-207
Author(s):  
Kathy Peiss
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Government ◽  
American Government ◽  
American Military ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Cultural Reconstruction ◽  
Innovative Methods ◽  
The Us

The discovery of looted books at the end of the war, especially those from Jewish libraries, tested the American military government. Gathering, conserving, and identifying them posed intractable challenges, even as American authorities faced domestic and international pressures over the Jewish books in particular. The Monuments Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) unit of the US Army, known as the Monuments Men, requisitioned Frankfurt’s Rothschild Library and later moved to a warehouse known as the Offenbach Archival Depot to establish operations for book restitution. This required innovative methods of librarianship designed to quickly manage and redistribute disarrayed and damaged volumes. The American government finally authorized Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. to handle the unidentifiable and heirless books, many of which came to the United States. For the Americans, these endangered books generated new understandings of the meaning of book collections, ownership, restitution, and cultural heritage.

Fugitive Records of War

2019 ◽  
pp. 122-145
Author(s):  
Kathy Peiss
Keyword(s):  
Global Politics ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Private Institution ◽  
American Military ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
Hoover Institution ◽  
Gray Market ◽  
War Correspondents ◽  
The Government ◽  
Collecting Mission

Although most research libraries accepted their reliance on the government-sponsored Library of Congress Mission, the Hoover Institution and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace did not. Its founder Herbert Hoover used the influence and reach of a former president to enable a private institution to operate where others were barred. Although eventually the Hoover Library won an authorized spot on the LCM, it largely operated in the shadows of the American military government. It drew upon an overlapping informal network of collectors, war correspondents, and intelligence agents to operate within the gray market for information in a defeated nation. These operations briefly came under scrutiny when one acquisition, The Goebbels Diaries, was published. Despite that episode, the library’s wartime collecting mission hastened the growth and prominence of the Hoover Institution as a center for the study of global politics, war, and diplomacy.

American Military Government in Korea

1952 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-127
Author(s):  
A. L. Sadler
Keyword(s):  
Military Government ◽  
American Military

Psychology in the Czech Republic, 1995–1998

1998 ◽  
Vol 83 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1275-1284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josef Brožek ◽  
Jiří Hoskovec
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Applied Psychology ◽  
Present Communication ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Research Institutes ◽  
American Research

In the spirit of earlier reports (1990–1995), the present communication covers developments at Czech universities, research institutes, societies and journals, international meetings, Czech-American research—biological and social, historiography of psychology in English, Czech-Slovak cooperation, and perspectives on applied psychology.

Occupation, Diplomacy, and the Moving Image

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sueyoung Park-Primiano
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Military Government ◽  
American Military ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Educational Films ◽  
Straightforward Interpretation ◽  
The U.S

This chapter, by S. Park-Primiano, examines the use of noncommercial films by the U.S. military to facilitate its diverse roles during its occupation of South Korea in the aftermath of World War II. Used by the American Military Government in Korea, educational films aided the U.S. military's efforts to Americanize the Korean population and combat Communism. Films were also used to inform and rally support for its policy in Korea from American military and civilian personnel at home as well as abroad. For this purpose, the U.S. military sought cooperation from and enlisted the assistance of Korean filmmakers in the production of films about Korean culture and history that challenge any straightforward interpretation of Americanization or a unidirectional influence. Moreover, such conflicting efforts had a long-lasting effect in South Korea. It was a practice that was continued by the succeeding information apparatus of the U.S. State Department and the United Nations during the Korean War and beyond to further expose the need for a closer examination of U.S. control of the Korean cultural imaginary.

Book Burning—American Style

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Kathy Peiss
Keyword(s):  
Public Libraries ◽  
Entire Body ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
American Military ◽  
American Style ◽  
Book World ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

The American military government in Germany faced a particular problem of mass acquisitions tied to postwar occupation policy. The Allies had agreed to purge Nazism from the German book world. The military confiscated countless volumes, sequestering and even destroying them. Bookstores and publishers had been forced to surrender these works. Over time this became an operation to make an entire body of published works inaccessible and unreadable. Communications experts, social scientists, progressive educators, and librarians applied their expertise to achieve this goal. However, when Order No. 4 was issued, requiring the confiscation and destruction of all Nazi material, including books in public libraries, many Americans accused the military of engaging in book burning. The episode reveals tensions over the relationship between reading, freedom, democracy, and the wartime state.

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