IISH

Guide to the International Archives

Guide to the International Archives
Jaap Haag and Atie van der Horst (eds), Guide to the International Archives and Collections at the IISH, Amsterdam ISBN 90.6861.186.0, 608 pp.

A new survey of all the international archival collections at the IISH is given in this new edition of the Guide to the International Archives and Collections at the IISH The first edition of this guide was published in 1989 but in the last ten years the IISH collections have increased considerably.

Next to many accruals to already deposited archives a great number of new archives and archival collections could be added. A lot of these are from Asiatic and North-African countries, areas which were hardly represented in the IISH archival collections until recently. They include for example the papers of the Turkish trade unionist and socialist Kemal Sülker, the Turkish author and critic Vâlâ Nûreddin Vâ-Nû, the Indonesian trade union leader Suparna Sastra Diredja, the Egyptian communist Shuhdi 'Atiyya al-Shafi'i and the papers of the so called Rome Group of exiled Egyptian communists of whom Henri Curiel was the pivot; furthermore archival collections relating to the Egyptian Tagammu Party, the Communist Party of Sudan, the Israeli Peace Movement, Iranian socialist and communist organizations, the Chinese dissident Chen-Wang group and progressive movements in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Also from the more 'traditional' areas of interest a great many new collections have been received, for instance the papers of the Belgian marxist economist Ernest Mandel, the American economist Andre Gunder Frank and the French neo-malthusianists Eugène and Jeanne Humbert, the archives of organizations such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Miners' International Federation (MIF) and Amnesty International (AI) as well as archival collections on the Mexican communist party, the East German opposition group Neues Forum and on the overthrow of communist rule in other Eastern European countries.

New in this edition are summaries of holdings at other institutions, of which the IISH has a reproduction, mostly in the form of microfilms or microfiches. Among these are many collections kept in Russia, including the holdings of the organizations of former victims of the Stalinist repression Memorial and Vozvrascenie.

Summaries of all these archives and collections, which include condensed biographies and histories of the persons and organizations concerned, can also be found in the online public catalogue and the index of archives on this website. Although the summaries in this guide had to be kept short, they nevertheless offer an intriguing panorama of the inspired, combative and often adventurous world of libertarians, socialists and other critics of existing social and political systems

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