DEPARTMENT OP HISTORICAL RESEARCH. II5 



J\lr. Fish will continue in Rome till the end of August, occupied with the 

 preparation of a volume which shall describe the materials for the history of 

 the United States to be found in the Vatican archives, in those of as many as 

 possible of the papal congregations, in those of the kingdom of Italy, and in 

 the various libraries of the city. Whenever material which under normal 

 modern conditions would be deposited in the central archives of the papal or 

 royal government is found to have strayed to other cities, as in the case of the 

 Farnesi archives at Naples, he is authorized to pursue it thither if there is 

 prospect that, in records, in registers, or in the correspondence of secretaries 

 or nuncios or other ecclesiastics, it contains papers relating to American his- 

 tory. 



It is desired next to set on foot an archive-mission in Germany. If the 

 plan be approved by the Board of Trustees, Prof. Marion D. Learned of the 

 University of Pennsylvania, editor of the official organ of the German- Amer- 

 ican Historical Society, will proceed to Germany in February, to spend six 

 months in researches on our behalf. Important reasons exist for making a 

 German mission the next in our series. If it were simply question of the dip- 

 lomatic archives of Prussia and the other German States, or in general of the 

 history of the public relations between those states and the United States, it is 

 probable that the German mission would be postponed to others. For in- 

 stance, the archives of the Netherlands contain much interesting material, 

 long familiar to scholars by reason of the admirable reports made 60 years 

 ago by John Romeyn Brodhead, but increased by modern additions, upon 

 which the Department has a valuable report from Prof. William I. Hull of 

 Swarthmore College. Much could be said in favor of an early dealing with 

 the British archives for the period since 1783 and their documents for the 

 history of diplomatic relations between Great Britain and America. A fuller 

 treatment of the Spanish archives must some time be undertaken; and, to say 

 nothing of the minor countries of Europe, the archives of Canada and its 

 provinces and of the British West Indies have strong claims to attention. 



But in the case of Germany we have not simply the historical problem of its 

 public relations to the United States, but the much more important subject of 

 the history of the great German migration to America in the seventeenth, 

 eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Next after the British movement to 

 North America and the Spanish to South America, this has been the greatest 

 migration of civilized mankind which history records. It has probably given 

 to the United States at least a sixth of its present blood. If historians are not 

 to be occupied solely with constitutional and political history, so vast a social 

 movement deserves that researches much more systematic than any heretofore 

 undertaken should be brought to bear upon the materials for its history. 

 Those materials are to be found in provincial and local archives, in those of 

 noble or formerly reigning families, and in the libraries of cities, ecclesiastical 



