DEPARTMENT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH. 159 



the existence and location, or assist him in the use, of bodies of his- 

 torical sources, or books which themselves present in proper scientific 

 form the full text of important historical materials. Thus the publi- 

 cations of the Department fall naturally into two classes, the one that 

 of reports, aids, and guides, the other that of textual publications of 

 documents. It has been customary in these annual reports to consider, 

 successively, first the work of the past year, in respect to each of these 

 two classes of publications and in respect to the miscellaneous activities 

 of the Department, and then the plans for the ensuing year, under the 

 same three headings. 



WORK OF THE PAST YEAR. 

 REPORTS, AIDS. AND GUIDES. 



Two volumes have been published for the Department during the 

 year. The first, issued in May, Publication No. 90 b, is entitled ' ' Guide 

 to the materials in London archives for the history of the United 

 States since 1783," a volume of 642 pages, prepared chiefly by Dr. 

 Charles 0. PauUin, now a member of the staff of the Department, and 

 Dr. Frederic L. Paxson, professor of American history in the Univer- 

 sity of Wisconsin. Certain parts of the volume were, for reasons set 

 forth in a previous report, prepared by Professor Charles E. Fryer of 

 McGill University, and b}^ Mr. David W. Parker, now a member of 

 the staff of the Archives of the Dominion of Canada. After a brief intro- 

 duction the volume takes up successively the Foreign Office papers for 

 the period 1783-1860, and those of the Home Office, War Office, 

 Colonial Office, Privy Council, House of Lords, Admiralty, Audit 

 Office, Board of Trade, Customs Department, General Post Office, 

 High Court of Admiralty, and Treasury (most of these now pre- 

 served in the Public Record Office in London), and the manuscripts 

 of the British Museum. Under each of these heads the compilers 

 have described, as well as it can be done in brief space for materials so 

 enormous in bulk, the manuscript material for American history of 

 the period from 1783-1860, which are contained in these respective 

 collections. The largest sections are those relating to the Foreign 

 Office Papers, Colonial Office Papers, Admiralty Papers, and British 

 Museum manuscripts. In most of these collections the official rule is 

 that the records are open to public inspection to the end of the year 

 1837 only; but special permission to extend the researches to 1860, and 

 in a few cases to a later date, was granted to our investigators. It is 

 believed that the book will be an indispensable manual for all those 

 who labor upon the history of the relations between England and the 

 United States since American independence, and that it will do much 

 good in permitting more thorough study of those relations, which 

 surely are among the most important topics of modern history. 



