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History of the Naval Historical Center
Story Number: navhist030123-01
1/23/2003
From Naval Historical Center
The Naval Historical Center traces its lineage to 1800 when President John Adams requested Benjamin Stoddert, the first Secretary of the Navy, to prepare a catalog of professional books for use in the Secretary’s office. When the British invaded Washington in 1814, this book collection was rushed to safety outside the Federal City. Thereafter the library had many locations, including a specially designed space in the State, War, and Navy Building (now the Old Executive Office Building) next to the White House.
When the library was placed under the Bureau of Navigation in 1882, the director, noted international lawyer and U.S. Naval Academy professor James Russell Soley, gathered the rare books scattered throughout various Navy Department offices, collected naval prints and photographs, and subscribed to professional periodicals. He also began to collect and preserve naval records, particularly those of the Civil War. Congress initially recognized his efforts by authorizing funds for an office staff and combining the library and records sections into the Office of Library and Naval War Records.
Six years later Congress appropriated the funds to print the first volume in a monumental documentary series, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion. Completed in 1927 with the publication of volume 31, the series marked the beginning of a responsibility to collect, edit, and publish historical naval documents, a mission that the Naval Historical Center continues to carry out in its American Revolution and War of 1812 documentary projects. In 1915 the appropriations for publications, the library, and naval war records were combined and the office received a new title—Office of Naval Records and Library.
Once America entered World War I, emphasis shifted to gathering documents on current naval operations. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels directed Admiral William F. Sims, Commander U.S. Naval Forces Operating in European Waters, to collect war diaries, operational reports, and other historic war materials of naval commands in his London headquarters.
To handle World War I records in Washington, a Historical Section was established in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, separate from the Office of Naval Records and Library and housed in the new Navy Department (“Main Navy”) Building on Constitution Avenue. When the war ended, Admiral Sims’s London collection and photographs and motion pictures from the various Navy bureaus were transferred to the Historical Section. The library, by now holding more than 50,000 volumes, remained in the State, War, and Navy Building.
In 1921, a former member of Admiral Sims’s wartime staff, Captain Dudley W. Knox, was named head of the Office of Naval Records and Library and the Historical Section. For the next twenty-five years he was the driving force behind the Navy’s historical program, earning for the office a national and international reputation in the field of naval archives and history. The Historical Section was absorbed into Naval Records and Library in 1927. Knox’s additional appointment as the Curator for the Navy envisioned a display of our nation’s sea heritage in a naval museum in Washington. In 1961, Admiral Arleigh Burke as Chief of Naval Operations established the U.S. Naval Historical Display Center (now The Navy Museum).
At President Roosevelt’s suggestion, Knox began several documentary series. Seven volumes pertaining to the Quasi War with France and seven volumes relating to the war with the Barbary Powers were ultimately published. World War II halted plans for similar publications on the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and World War I. During World War II, Knox turned his attention to collecting documents generated by naval operations in the global conflict. He immediately began a campaign to gather and arrange operation plans, action reports, and war diaries into a well-controlled archives staffed by professional historians who came on board as naval reservists.
To complement the developing World War II operational archives, the Knox group pioneered an oral history program whereby participants in the significant Atlantic and Pacific operations and battles were interviewed as soon as possible after their wartime engagements. When Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard history professor Samuel Eliot Morison was commissioned by President Roosevelt to prepare the fifteen-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, he relied not only on his own combat experience, but also on those records assembled in Knox’s archives.
In 1944, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal established the Office of Naval History to coordinate the Morison project, as well as the wartime administrative histories being written by Navy commands and other projected histories. Although Knox served as Deputy Director of Naval History under the Director, Admiral Edward C. Kalbfus, the Office of Naval Records and Library at first remained separate. The Office of Naval History and the Office of Naval Records and Library merged in March 1949 to form the Naval Records and History Division of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. In 1952 it was renamed the Naval History Division.
The eventual home for the Navy’s historians was the Washington Navy Yard in Southeast Washington, which in 1961 was converted from an industrial facility to an administrative center. The first component of the Naval History Division located in the yard was The Navy Museum, established in 1961. In 1963, the Operational Archives moved to the Navy Yard. The other sections of the Naval History Division followed in 1970, occupying space in several scattered buildings.
In another organizational change in 1971, the Naval History Division was shifted out of the headquarters establishment and became the Naval Historical Center, a field activity under the Chief of Naval Operations. Most of the Center’s activities were brought together in 1982, when they moved into the historic building complex named to honor Dudley W. Knox, who perhaps did more than any other individual to strengthen and reinforce the Navy’s commitment to its historic heritage and traditions.
The present organizational structure was completed in 1986 when the Navy Art Collection and Gallery and the Naval Aviation History and Publication Division, both already located in the Washington Navy Yard, became part of the Naval Historical Center.
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