Database Guide

Document Collections

The History Lab’s database organizes its various texts under the broader collections they were originally a part of. Here is a list of the various accessible collections that have been digitized and can be accessed through the API:

Collection Code	Collection Name	Document Count
frus	Foreign Relations of the United States	209,046
cia	Records from the CIA Freedom of Information Act Reading Room	935,716
clinton	Hillary Clinton Emails	54,149
pdb	President’s Daily Briefs	5,011
cfpf	Central Foreign Policy Files	3,214,293
kissinger	Henry Kissinger Telephone Conversations	4,552
nato	NATO Digital Archives	46,002

This information can also be viewed directly through the API using the list_collections() function.

Document Fields

Each individual data point in the History Lab’s database represents a single text, and the fields in each data row represent different pieces of information about each text that can be extracted by users through the API. Here is a list of some of the common fields:

Field Name	Field Description
authored	Date and time stamp of when the document was authored
body	The full text body of the document
countries	A list of all the countries mentioned in the document
persons	A list of all the persons mentioned in the document
persons_id	Lists the unique IDs for all the persons that appear in the document
topics	A list of all the topics mentioned in the document
title	The text title of the document
doc_id	The document’s unique ID, also contains information on which collection the document belongs to