Prologue
Introduction
Ch. 1 The Country of the Mind Must Also Attack
Ch. 2 Librarians and Collectors Go to War
Ch. 3 The Wild Scramble for Documents
Ch. 4 Acquisitions Grand Scale
Ch. 5 Fugitive Records of War
Ch. 6 Book Burning-American Style
Ch. 7 Not a Library, but a Large Depot of Loot
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of
American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the
author of Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in
Turn-of-the-Century New York, Hope in a Jar: The Making of
America's Beauty Culture, and Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an
Extreme Style. A Fellow of the Society of American Historians, she
has served as a consultant to museums,
archives, documentary films, and public history projects.
"In her fascinating new book on information gathering and
intelligence during WW II, Peiss spotlights the contributions of
the American scholarly community. Her studyDLimpressively
researched and engagingly writtenDLexplores the ways in which
librarians, archivists, and academics traveled throughout Europe to
collect information relevant to the war effort....Peiss's narrative
traces the work of these scholars from the procurement of open
source materials at the
beginning of the war through the collection of enemy documents in
its closing stages to the thorny questions surrounding mass
acquisitions in postwar Germany....In illuminating the link
between
information science and intelligence gathering, as well as the
importance of foreign holdings in libraries as a symbol of American
power, Peiss demonstrates that the academic community and military
enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship." -- CHOICE
"The book is carefully researched, written with care and skill, and
provides an additional warning about the horrors of wartime." --
Bob Lane, Metapsychology
"Excellent and engaging....[Peiss's] analysis is smart, insightful,
and compelling....Thanks to Peiss's informative and original book,
we now know...why and how so many war-era German books and
documents ended up in American research libraries....The
information hunters...contributed to the development of information
science,...helped tighten the relations between government, the
military, and research university and libraries...and shaped the
postwar
intelligence activities and tactics of the National Security Agency
and the CIA." -- Matthew Avery Sutton, Reviews in American
History
"In astonishing detail, Peiss's study chronicles the multi-pronged
efforts of American librarians, archivists, scholars, and military
and intelligence personnel who activated a mass acquisitions
programme that resulted in some two million foreign books and
periodicals, thousands of microfilm reels, and 160,000 volumes
looted from European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators,
which found their way to repositories in the United States." --
Christine
Schmidt, Library & Information History
"A marvelous new book about spy craft and the book world....I beg
the creatives out there to read...and write a dramatic miniseries
about bookish spies during the Second World War." -- Elyse Graham,
Public Books
"Illuminating the growing global power of the United States in the
realms of intelligence and cultural heritage, Peiss tells the story
of the men and women who went to Europe to collect and protect
books and information and in doing so enriches the debates over the
use of data in times of both war and peace." -- Tom Gilson, Against
the Grain
"This well-written and astutely researched book makes the wartime
work of librarians engaging and engrossing. Those fascinated by
intelligence missions or keen on the history of library science
will appreciate this excellent read." -- Library Journal (starred
review)
"Information Hunters is Kathy Peiss's wonderfully surprising
history of a little-known, World War II intelligence effort to
gather newspapers, magazines, books, and every other kind of
printed information about business, science, and ordinary life in
Germany and occupied Europe. Working mainly through cities in
neutral countries DL Lisbon, Stockholm, Bern, and the like DL
agents quietly arranged to gather bundles, then truckloads, finally
ship- and
train-loads of books and paper for analysts to study. It's a
beautiful piece of scholarship that reveals the war in a new light
-- as a struggle for knowledge and truth." -- Thomas Powers, author
of Heisenberg's
War: The Secret History of the German Bomb
"This fascinating book tells the story of the American librarians
who set out on vast collecting missions amidst the destruction of
World War II Europe. Cultural historian Kathy Peiss deftly
reconstructs their work here, showing how librarians shaped the war
and, in turn, how the war re-shaped libraries and librarianship.
Beautifully told, this surprising story provides a valuable new
perspective on the historical connection between war and the
production of
knowledge." -- Lisa Moses Leff, American University
"Kathy Peiss uncovers fascinating episodes in the history of
information: the World War II entanglement of bibliography and
spycraft as well as the postwar dilemmas of denazifying German
culture while also dealing with cultural heritage collections that
the Nazis left orphaned in their double project of confiscation and
genocide. With its lucid attention to 'open source' intelligence
gathering, incipient 'archive-consciousness,' and the anxieties of
American
influence on the world, this is history that is at once powerful
and timely." -- Lisa Gitelman, New York University
"Kathy Peiss's InformationHunters tells the fascinating and
important story of the American archivists and librarians who,
during World War II, helped rescue, preserve, and repatriate huge
numbers of books, newspapers, and manuscripts looted by the Nazis
or otherwise hidden from sight. Their principal objectives were to
confiscate and, in many cases, destroy Nazi materials and to locate
and return or redistribute looted Jewish books. Many books
wound
up in American libraries and archives, greatly boosting their size
and prestige, and helping to develop the field of information
science." -- John B. Hench, author of Books as Weapons: Propaganda,
Publishing,
and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II
"Through savvy research Kathy Peiss has uncovered the enormous
historical, ethical, and personal stakes of Americans' overseas
efforts to collect -- or destroy -- the printed word during World
War II. Her vivid account follows teams of scholars who scoured
Europe's bookstores, battered cities, castles, and caves in search
of material that bore witness to the continent's cultural heritage
as well as its lies, secrets, and crimes. Pulling a book off the
shelf of
an American research library will never be the same after reading
Information Hunters." -- Brooke L. Blower, author of Becoming
Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the
World
Wars
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