The Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State recently announced the release of its third set of public beta Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series e-books at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/ebooks. The 151 year-old FRUS series presents the official documentary historical record of major foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity of the U.S. Government.

This release includes 10 volumes from the Nixon-Ford subseries, including 4 volumes documenting the Vietnam War:

“Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1969-1972”
“Organization & Management of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1969-1972”
“Foreign Economic Policy; International Monetary Policy, 1969–1972”
“Foreign Assistance, International Development, Trade Policies, 1969–1972”
“United Nations, 1969–1972”
“Vietnam, January 1969–July 1970”
“Vietnam, July 1970–January 1972”
“Vietnam, January–October 1972”
“Vietnam, October 1972–January 1973”
“South Asia Crisis, 1971”

These 10 volumes join the following 16 FRUS e-books previously released:

“Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, 1945-1950”
“Guatemala, 1952-1954”
“Suez Crisis, July 26–December 31, 1956”
“Berlin Crisis, 1959–1960; Germany, Austria, 1958-1960”
“Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath”
“Africa, 1961-1963”
“Western Europe, 1964-1968”
“Cyprus; Greece; Turkey, 1964-1968”
“Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967”
“Vietnam, January 1973–July 1975”
“Soviet Union, January 1969–October 1970”
“China, 1969–1972”
“Middle East Region and Arabian Peninsula, 1969–1972; Jordan, September 1970”
“Foreign Economic Policy, 1973–1976”
“SALT I, 1969–1972”
“Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973–1976”

The e-book edition combines many of the benefits of print and web publications in a new form that is portable and extremely convenient. The public is invited to download the beta e-books and provide feedback to help improve the FRUS e-book edition. At the conclusion of the pilot phase later this year, the Office will work to offer e-book versions on a wide array of e-bookstores. The Office will continue to expand and enhance its e-book offerings, as part of the ongoing FRUS digitization effort.

The FRUS e-book initiative is an outgrowth of the Office of the Historian’s efforts to optimize the series for its website. Because the Office adopted the Text Encoding Initiative’s open, robust XMLbased file format (TEI), a single digital master TEI file can store an entire FRUS volume and can be transformed into either a set of web pages or an e-book. The free, open source eXist-db server that powers the entire Office of the Historian website also provides the tools needed to transform the FRUS TEI files into HTML and e-book formats.