About the Foreign Relations of the United States Series

The Department of State has published the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, the official documentary record of U.S. foreign policy, since 1861. The Office of the Historian (OH) prepares the series under the requirements established by Public Law 102-138 (105 Stat. 647, codified in relevant part at 22 U.S.C. § 4351 et seq.), enacted in 1991 and amended in 2021, which specifies that the Historian of the Department of State is responsible for the preparation of the series. To ensure that FRUS is “a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions and significant United States diplomatic activity,” the statute requires OH to make use of documentation from across the national security establishment and directs United States Government departments, agencies, and other entities to provide OH historians full and complete access to pertinent records at 20 years. The statute also mandates publication of volumes 30 years after the events they document.

Under the direction of the General Editor of the FRUS series, OH historians plan the overall scope and content of the series, and research, compile, and edit individual volumes according to guidelines established in 1925 by Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and codified in the FRUS statute. These include: that the editing of records selected for inclusion in the series shall be guided by the principles of historical objectivity and accuracy; that records should not be altered or deletions made without indicating in the published text that a deletion has been made; that the published record should omit no facts that were of major importance in reaching a decision; and that nothing should be omitted for the purposes of concealing a defect in policy.

FRUS documents the history of U.S. bilateral and regional relations; global issues such as terrorism, narcotics, health, and the environment; and topics such as national security policy, foreign economic policy, and foreign policy organization and management. The series is a highly visible manifestation of the U.S. Government’s commitment to responsible transparency, providing U.S. citizens an understanding of historical foreign policies. Based upon research in the records of the White House, National Security Council, Departments of State and Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, and other foreign affairs agencies, as well as the private papers of individual U.S. foreign policymakers, FRUS illuminates how U.S. decision makers determined foreign policy and what that policy aimed to achieve, increasing understanding of the United States and its role in the world among scholars, the public, and the international community. The series offers important insight into the origins of contemporary challenges, serving the national interest by providing a sound basis of historical context to support current policymaking. The international reach of FRUS has proven valuable to U.S. efforts to shape global norms of historical transparency and offers citizens of many nations an important source for an accurate understanding of their own histories.