- Foreword / by George P. Shultz
- 1. Foundations: Remember the Lusitania!
- 2. The View from the Tower: The Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Herbert Hoover and Poland, The Okhrana Collection Revealed, Alexander Kerensky at Hoover, Nicolas de Basily Room
- 3. Hoover Becomes a Think Tank: Truth as a Weapon: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Ten Landmark Books by Hoover Fellows, George Stigler, The United States in the 1980s
- 4. Into a New Century: Robert Conquest, Gorbachev at Stanford 1990 and 1992, Microfilming Soviet Communist Party Documents, Thatcher on the Quad, President George W. Bush and the Hoover Institution 2006, Hoover Nobel Laureates in Economics, Firing Line, Honors and Awards, Chiang Kai-Shek's Diaries.
A century ago, amid the devastation of World War I, Herbert Hoover established a collection of library and archival materials at Stanford University devoted to the causes and consequences of war. Founded as the Hoover War Collection in 1919, the institution has evolved into one of the world's premier research centers devoted to the advanced study of politics, economics, and international affairs. Defining Moments charts the origins and growth of what is today the Hoover Institution over the course of a century of global upheaval, from World War I and the Russian Revolution, through World War II and the Cold War, to the rapidly developing challenges we face today. The connecting thread is the notion encapsulated in the institution's slogan, Ideas Defining a Free Society: that American values of democracy, capitalism, and freedom can serve as a blueprint for improving lives around the world. Richly illustrated with rare photographs, political posters, and archival gems, Defining Moments traces the growth over the past century of Hoover's unparalleled collections on war, revolution, and peace and chronicles Hoover's emergence, beginning in the 1960s, as a public-policy research center whose mission is to foster prosperity, maintain democracy, and preserve peace.
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