Search Tips
The Office of the Historian’s search engine contains several useful search options. Understanding the search engine’s defaults, as well as the following techniques and syntax, will help improve your search results. Example searches linked below will pre-fill the search form with the parameters of your search to see the results.
Defaults
- By default, the search engine returns documents from the entire site† containing all of the search terms you enter. (Note: Before December 2017, the search engine’s default behavior was to return documents containing any of the terms. To perform that kind of search now, just place an OR boolean operator between each term.)
- All keyword searches are case-insensitive, so searching for “SALT” will return the same results as searching for “salt.”
- You can refine a query by:
- narrowing its scope to specific sections of the website;
- using phrase, boolean, wildcard, and proximity operators in your keyword search; and
- filtering results by date and time ranges or specific Foreign Relations volumes.
† Note that the search engine’s results are limited to the materials that the Office of the Historian has digitized. Please consult the full list of Foreign Relations volumes by administration to see which volumes have been digitized (indicated by the phrase, “full text,” next to each volume’s title). For early FRUS volumes not yet available here, we provide links to the University of Wisconsin Madison FRUS collection, or in some circumstances, WorldCat.
Scope
Beneath the keyword search field is a set of checkboxes, labeled “Filter by
Section.” Selecting any of the checkboxes can narrow the scope of your
search to specific sections of the website, resulting in a faster, more
specific query. The default set of checkboxes contains the major content
sections of the website:
- Historical Documents
- Includes Foreign Relations of the United States documents
- Department History
- Includes Principal Officers and Chiefs of Mission, Travels of the President and Secretary, Visits of Foreign Leaders, etc.
- Countries
- Includes Guide to the United States’ History of Recognition, Diplomatic, and Consular Relations, by Country, since 1776
- Conferences
- Includes Transcripts of conferences held by the Office of the Historian
- History of the Foreign Relations Series
- About
- Includes FAQ, Advisory Committee Minutes
- Retired Resources
- Includes Milestones, Education
To search for articles about U.S. diplomatic history that relate to peace, you could select these two sections and enter the keyword “peace”:
☑ Department History
☑ Retired Resources (Milestones)
peace
(Click on the link to try out this search.)
If no scope checkboxes are selected, the entire site will be searched. To achieve the best results, combine scope with the following keyword search operators:
Searching with Keywords
Phrases
When you type your search terms into the box, the search engine will search for those terms, individually, anywhere in a document. To force the search engine to find fixed phrases (i.e., specific, ordered combinations of words), place the phrase in quotation marks. To locate documents which include both “peaceful” and “nuclear” anywhere in the text, use the following search:
peaceful nuclear
To locate documents which use the phrase “peaceful nuclear,” use this search:
"peaceful nuclear"
Booleans
The search engine will allow you to perform Boolean searches (AND, OR, and NOT). Boolean operators must be in all caps.
You can use Boolean operators with individual terms or with phrases enclosed in quotation marks. For example, to locate documents which include both the word “Kissinger” and the phrase “peaceful nuclear,” use this search:
Kissinger "peaceful nuclear"
To locate documents which include either “Rhodesia” or “Zimbabwe,” use this search:
Rhodesia OR Zimbabwe
To locate documents which include the phrase “arms control” but exclude documents which also include the term “SALT,” use this search:
"arms control" NOT SALT
You can also use the plus (+) and minus (-) signs to include or exclude certain terms. To search for documents which must include the phrase “law of the sea” and may include the term “seabed,” use this search:
+"law of the sea" seabed
To search for documents which include “Korea” but not “DMZ,” use this search:
Korea -DMZ
Finally, you can use parentheses to nest your searches. To find documents which include “Guatemala” or “El Salvador” and “Belize,” use this search:
(Guatemala OR "El Salvador") AND Belize
Wildcards
If you are unsure about the spelling of a term or want to find variants of a term, you can use wildcards. The search engine supports two wildcard characters: ? and *.
If you want to replace a single letter in your search term, use ? in your query. To find documents which include “text” or “test,” use this search:
te?t
Note that the above search will not return hits for “Tet” or “teapot.” If you want to replace zero or more letters in your search term use * in your query. For example, to find documents which include “Vietnam” and “Vietnamese,” use this search:
Vietna*
Note that the above search will not return hits for “Viet Nam,” another spelling of the same country. You may have to try multiple variants of the same search to get all the results you need.
Proximity
If you are searching for common words, you can tell the search engine to only return documents in which the words are within a distance you define. To find documents which include “Cuba” and “submarine” within 10 words of each other, use this search:
"Cuba submarine"~10
We are aware that “keyword in context” summary of the results of proximity searches are not displaying correctly. The search results themselves, however, are reliable.
Filtering By Date and Time (Alpha Release)
- Date and time filters may be applied to searches within the Historical Documents (Foreign Relations series) section of the site. These filters will be active only if the Historical Documents section is checked.
- Exact dates or date-time ranges may be used in conjunction with keywords and/or volumes, or used alone by leaving the search box blank.
- Date and time filters may be used at the beginning of a search or to refine the results of a search.
- Per U.S. conventions, dates should be entered in Month-Date-Year format and time in 12-hour format, with “am” or “pm” selected.
Exact Date
To search or filter results by an exact date, enter a single date into the “Start Date” set of fields. For example, a search for historical documents dated December 7, 1941 should be entered as:
☑ Historical Documents
Start Date Month Day Year 12 07 1941
live example
Exact Date and Time
To search or filter results by an exact date and time, enter a single date into the “Start Date” set of fields and a single time into the “Start Time” set of fields. For example, a search for historical documents created on December 7, 1941 at 8 p.m. should be entered as:
☑ Historical Documents
Start Date Month Day Year 12 07 1941
Start Time Hour Minute 8 00 ◦ am ⦿ pm
live example
Date Range
To search or filter results by a date range, use the “Start Date” and “End Date” sets of fields. For example, a search for historical documents including the term “Cuba” and created between October 16, 1962 and October 28, 1962 should be entered as:
Cuba*
☑ Historical Documents
Start Date Month Day Year 10 16 1962
End Date Month Day Year 10 28 1962
live example
Month-Year
To search or filter results for all historical documents produced on any day during a particular month and year, use a date range search. For example, a search for historical documents including the terms “National Security Council” or “NSC” dated sometime in September 1974 should be entered as:
"National Security Council" OR "NSC"
☑ Historical Documents
Start Date Month Day Year 09 01 1974
End Date Month Day Year 09 30 1974
live example
Single Year
To search or filter results for all historical documents produced during a particular year, use a date range search. For example, a search for historical documents including the term “Russia“ and dated sometime in 1917 should be entered as:
Russia*
☑ Historical Documents
Start Date Month Day Year 01 01 1917
End Date Month Day Year 12 31 1917
live example
Year Range
To search or filter results for all historical documents produced during a particular range of years, use a date range search. For example, a search for historical documents including the term “union” dated sometime between 1861 and 1865 should be entered as:
union
☑ Historical Documents
Start Date Month Day Year 01 01 1861
End Date Month Day Year 12 31 1865
live example
Date and Time Range
To search for all historical documents produced during a particular span of dates and times, use a date and time range search. For example, a search for all historical documents created or sent between noon on August 9, 1974 and 6:30 am on August 10, 1974 should be entered as:
☑ Historical Documents
Start Date Month Day Year 08 09 1974
Start Time Hour Minute 12 00 ◦ am ⦿ pm
End Date Month Day Year 08 10 1974
End Time Hour Minute 6 30 ◦ am ⦿ pm
live example
Filtering By Volume (Alpha Release)
- Volumes filters may be applied to searches within the Historical Documents (Foreign Relations series) section of the site.
- Volumes may be used in conjunction with keywords and/or dates or used alone by leaving the search box blank.
- Volume filters may be used at the beginning of a search or to refine the results of a search.
Taking the last example above, we can further refine the search results by checking one or more Foreign Relations volumes of interest. For example, a search for all historical documents created or sent between noon on August 9, 1974 and 6:30 am on August 10, 1974 and limited to the 1969–1976, Volume X, Vietnam, January 1973–July 1975 and 1969–1976, Volume XXXV, National Security Policy, 1973–1976 volumes should be entered as:
☑ Historical Documents
Start Date Month Day Year 08 09 1974
Start Time Hour Minute 12 00 ◦ am ⦿ pm
End Date Month Day Year 08 10 1974
End Time Hour Minute 6 30 ◦ am ⦿ pm
☑ 1969–1976, Vietnam, January 1973–July 1975, Volume X
☑ 1969–1976, National Security Policy, 1973–1976, Volume XXXV
live example