The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series is published in print and online editions at the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian website.
In keeping with the spirit of the Digital Government Strategy's goals to provide the public with access to high-quality digital government information and services and help unlock the power of government data to spur innovation, the Office of the Historian is releasing the digital master source files for the online edition of the Foreign Relations series.
The digital master source files for the Foreign Relations series have been prepared according to the
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) P5 Guidelines. Our project-specific encoding guidelines and
conformance requirements can be found in the schema
directory, where we have supplied a
TEI ODD file, as well as Schematron
and RelaxNG files used for additional conformance checks. The volumes are stored in the volumes
directory, one file per volume. Bibliographic information about all volumes in the series, including those volumes
not yet available in full text TEI, is stored in the bibliography
directory.
URLs for FRUS on history.state.gov all follow this pattern:
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/{VOLUME_ID}/{ELEMENT_ID}
- where
{VOLUME_ID}
is the volume identifier and corresponds to the base name of the files in thevolumes
directory. - and
{ELEMENT_ID}
is the identifier for an element within the volume's XML file and corresponds to the value of an@xml:id
attribute on a TEI element, e.g.,<div xml:id="ch1" type="chapter">
.
Volume identifiers generally follow this hierarchical convention:
frus
-
{SUBSERIES}
-
{VOLUME_NUMBER}
-
{PART_NUMBER}
For example, frus1969-76v19p1
is Volume XIX, Part 1 of the Nixon-Ford subseries (1969โ76), within the Foreign Relations series.
Element identifiers generally fall into one of these types:
ch{NUMBER}
orcomp{NUMBER}
: a chapter or compilation numberd{NUMBER}
: a document numberd{NUMBER}fn{NUMBER}
: a footnote within a documentp_{PERSON_ID}
ort_{TERM_ID}
: an entry for a person or term in the List of Persons or List of Terms & Abbreviations{SECTION_ID}
: a section title, e.g.,preface
corresponds to the Preface
For example, to locate the source data for https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v24/d176
, you should locate frus1969-76v24.xml
in the volumes
directory and search for a TEI element whose @xml:id
attribute value is d176
. You can safely assume that d176
is the <div>
for Document 176 of this volume.
Not all information found at a given URL from history.state.gov necessarily comes from the element identifier in the URL. For example, in this Document 176, the left sidebar contains a table of contents for the entire volume (derived from the compilation and chapter <div>
elements), and the right sidebar contains a listing of the people and terms & abbreviations used in the document (derived from the persons
and terms
glossaries in the front matter).
We plan to release updates to this repository on a quarterly basis. Releases will include fixes to already published volumes, new publications, and digitized legacy volumes.
We welcome your feedback about this repository and how we can improve it. Please submit an issue or email us at [email protected].
The files in this repository are in the public domain and may be copied and distributed without permission. For more information, see http://www.state.gov/misc/87529.htm#copyright.