[1] When World War I erupted, Hoover found himself in Europe, quickly becoming involved in ongoing efforts to provide relief aid to wartime refugees.

In the first volume his memoirs, published in 1951, Hoover wrote: I did a vast amount of reading, mostly on previous wars, revolutions, and peace-makings of Europe and especially the political and economic aftermaths.

At one time I set up some research at London, Paris, and Berlin into previous famines in Europe to see if there had developed any ideas on handling relief and pestilence.

I read in one of Andrew D. White's writings that most of the fugitive literature of comment during the French Revolution was lost to history because no one set any value on it at the time, and that without such material it became very difficult or impossible to reconstruct the real scene.

In February 1919, Congress established a new agency known as the American Relief Administration as a mechanism for the supply of food aid to the hungry people of post-war Europe.

[5] A massive number of books, pamphlets, documents, and posters were acquired, crated, and shipped back to California on behalf of the project.

[4] The documents were initially housed within the main Stanford Library, but by 1929 the collection had reached 1.4 million items and space was becoming a problem.