Scope and Content Note
The records of the United States American Peace Commission to Negotiate Peace span the years 1898-1919, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1918-1919. The collection includes copies of despatches, intelligence summaries, news summaries, articles, reports, abstracts, transcriptions, bibliographies, agreements, memoranda, notebooks, petitions, maps, charts, economic, political, and financial data, and miscellaneous typescripts and mimeographed material relating to the work of the peace commission at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, including documents from the study group the Inquiry created by the Woodrow Wilson administration to prepare material for the peace following the war.
The records have been arranged and described largely as received and include a small addition appended to the collection in 1997. The records are organized into ten series: State Department Intelligence Reports ; Economics Reports ; International Law ; International Organizations ; International Relations Reports ; Special Reports on Countries, Peoples, and Regions ; Documents or Proceedings Bearing upon or Stemming from the Conference of Paris ; Miscellany ; Addition ; and Oversize .
Much of the collection is arranged according to the countries and regions whose postwar status, boundary lines, and nationalities were under discussion at the Paris Peace Conference. Scholars whose contributions to the commission are featured include Henryk Arctowski, George Louis Beer, Clive Day, Ronald B. Dixon, Sidney Fay, Charles H. Haskins, Stanley K. Hornbeck, Dorothy Kenyon, Robert J. Kerner, Paul Monroe, Will S. Monroe, Samuel Eliot Morison, Wallace Notestein, and Preston W. Slosson.