Special Collections: General Slavic

Bulgaria: Records of the U.S. Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs is a collection primarily of instructions to and dispatches from U.S. diplomatic and consular staff concerning political, economic, military, social, and other internal correspondences and events in Bulgaria. Documents include U.S. State Department reports and memoranda, communications between the State Department and foreign governments and other U.S. departments. Of interest to scholars in history, political science, international relations, foreign affairs, and Slavic studies.

Letter from V. H. Vulchanov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, regarding his son who left an airplane in Gander, Newfoundland in 1990 and asked for asylum in Canada.

The Library of Congress Cyrillic Catalogue is one of the most important bibliographic tools in Slavic area studies. It consists of the monographs and serials holdings in the Library of Congress in Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian, along with other titles reported by 185 American libraries. This includes major parts of collections at the New York Public Library, the Hoover Library and the libraries of Columbia, Harvard and Yale. All entries are transliterated into the Roman alphabet using the Library of Congress transliteration system.

Two scrapbooks compiled by Jabez Henry Elliott, professor of the History of Medicine, documenting his attendance at the 10 and 11th International Congresses on the History of Medicine that were held in Madrid and Toledo, Spain in 1935 and in Yugoslavia in 1938, respectively. Elliott was sent as the representative for the University of Toronto. The first scrapbook contains programmes, a running typed report on the conference, press coverage, annotated photographs, conference pamphlets and brochures (including one on the history of medicine). The second scrapbook includes his report to President Cody on the conference . It also contains tourist brochures and maps of the period, postcards and original photographs of sites throughout Yugoslavia including Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar and Dubrovnik. Also includes memorabilia such as invitations and programmes attended by Elliott during his stay. 

Created by U.S. Presidential directive during World War II and at first placed under the Federal Communications Commission in 1941, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was later transferred to the War Department, and then to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.

The original mission of FBIS was to monitor, record, transcribe and translate intercepted radio broadcasts from foreign governments, official news services, and clandestine broadcasts from occupied territories. These translations, or transcriptions in the case of English language materials, make up the Daily Reports.

The FBIS Daily Reports collection is divided into two chronological segments: 1941-1974 and 1974-1996. FBIS Daily Reports, 1941-1974, consists of a single Daily Report publication. FBIS Daily Reports, 1974-1996, is comprised of eight separate regional Daily Reports, of which Part 6 pertains to Eastern Europe (EEU), and Part 7 to the Soviet Union and Central Eurasia (SOV). Regional coverage for eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is also included for the years 1968 to 1974.

The reports includes news, interviews, speeches, editorial commentary, and other materials.

Photos of the meeting of the International Astronomical Union Held in the Soviet Union, 1958. Helen Hogg, as well as other Canadian astronomers including A. Batten and S. van de Bergh, were present and can be seen in these shots. 

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes more than 2,000 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to the United States and Canada between 1800 and 1950. The materials date from around 1840 and extend to the present, focusing heavily on the period from 1920 to 1980. Personal stories provide perspectives both on North America and on the immigrants’ countries of origin, including Eastern and South Europe, as well the Baltic countries. Users will find vivid descriptions of life under the Tsar and the various revolutionary governments in Russia; accounts of anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe; stories of persecution and fascism; and detailed descriptions of life in rural communities and towns as well as in major cities such as Budapest, Warsaw, and Moscow.

Oral History Online (OHI) is a landmark database of English language oral histories. It contains at present more than 34,000 pages of full-text content. This full-text material includes Ellis Island oral history narratives and rare Black Panther Party interviews. Oral History Online is also an index to free oral history information on the Web. Working with archives, repositories and individuals, OHI indexed oral histories held by organizations around the world. Many oral stories are related to history of Eastern and South Europe, as well the Baltic countries, for example: oral accounts of the Russian Revolution, 1917-1921: World War II; emigration from Eastern Europe; and Diaspora life in North America, etc.

Thanks to a generous grant from the SSHRC of Canada in 1985, PIMS purchased on microfiche many serial publications of Imperial Russia from the 19th and early 20th centuries. These cover topics such as Church and political history, antiquities, archaeology, law, and numismatics. Since 1980 PIMS has also been acquiring materials on the medieval Balkans. The same criteria used for purchasing books for Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy are applied here. The Slavic Collection was expanded to provide research materials for the study of the Slavs in the so-called “Byzantine Commonwealth."

This collection is an update to the Cyrillic Union Catalog, and covers all new pre-1956 Cyrillic monographs and serial titles reported to the Library of Congress between 1956-1978. It also lists all earlier Cyrillic Union Catalog titles.

World Communism: Pamphlets from McMaster University, 1901-1969 is a collection of un-catalogued pamphlets relating to communism, socialism, and class struggle. Topics covered include translated speeches from Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov from post-WWII China and Soviet Russia; anti-American tracts, pro-revolutionary materials, and a small number of Fidel Castro's speeches from late-1950s Cuba; and a small number of pamphlets from late-1930s/early-1940s Britain on class struggle, working conditions for labourers, Argentina’s May Revolution of 1810 against Spain, Marxism or Leninism, civil rights, and women’s rights. Some of the Cuban material is only available in French. Of interest to scholars of political science, area studies, labour studies, race studies, women and gender studies, and history.