State. That July 1947 issue remains a collector's item, and the reprints of the article are by a considerable margin still at the top of the Council's circulation of reprints, with demand continuing at a steady rate.

THE LANGER HISTORIES

One other project of the 1940s deserves mention here, although it was not covered in the Princeton exhibit. In 1945 the Council's Committee on Studies felt that there was a great need for the most authoritative and balanced account possible of the diplomatic background behind the entry of the United States into the Second World War, and of its wartime diplomacy. They had in mind, I am sure, not only the usual need for good history of a crucial period, but the memory of the endless and disruptive controversies ofthe late-1920s and 1930s over how the United States got into the First World War controversies that lacked a common base of authoritative information and did much to paralyze American policy in the 1930s. Moreover, they sensed that whatever the biases and special interests that might have played a part in 1917, the story was different for the years from 1937 through to 1941 and then to the end of the War.

William Langer, just back at Harvard after serving in the estimating and analytic side of the Office of Strategic Services, and still the dean of diplomatic historians, with a high reputation for thoroughness and integrity, was the natural choice for the assignment, which he accepted for what was thought at first to be a four-year job. But