Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS)

"The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, which is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 450 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies." (U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian)

• FRUS from the State Department's website (Some of the most recent volumes are being published as "electronic only" versions.)
• FRUS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• FRUS from Hein Online (Yale subscription)

U.S. Declassified Documents Online, formerly known as Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS) provides full-text declassified documents from U.S. government agencies, including the CIA, FBI, White House, State Department, and others. Document types include: correspondence, memoranda, minutes of cabinet meetings, technical studies, national security policy statements, and intelligence estimates.

• Yale also has the DDRS microfiche set of declassified documents, which is searchable through a CD-ROM index (available at the Marx Science and Social Science Library). A print index is also available: 1975-1985, and 1986-2005. The CD-ROM and print indexes have the same content, so there is no need to search both indexes in order to locate documents in the microfiche set.

Declassified documents freely available on the web can be found at federal agencies' web sites (search the agency's site for "FOIA" or "electronic reading room"), from presidential libraries, research institutes, or other sites, sometimes presented by subject. Below are examples of such sites:

• CIA Electronic Reading Room
• State Department Electronic Reading Room
• Pentagon Papers (National Archives; includes "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force," along with supplemental documentation)
• PlusD (WIKILEAKS Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy; includes over 2 million records from a variety of sources, including FOIA documents, leaks, and documents declassified by the U.S. State Department - many of these materials were previously released on the National Archives' website)
• Gulflink (documents relating to the Persian Gulf War)
• OPENNET (Dept. of Energy)
• Presidential Recordings Program (University of Virginia, Miller Center of Public Affairs)
• The Vietnam War Declassification Project (Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library)
• Declassified Government Documents (guide from UT-Austin Library)