The records described in this inventory belong to Record Group 84, Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State. They are both complementary and supplementary to records in Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State. Both record groups contain communications and other papers transmitted between the Foreign Service posts and the State Department in Washington. In Record Group 45, Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library, are materials dealing with the African slave trade and Negro colonization. Papers relating to the slave trade and its suppression are to be found in Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States; Record Group 48, General Records of the Department of the Interior; Record Group 60, General Records of the Department of Justice; and Record Group 118, Records of the United States Attorneys and Marshals.

The Italian Institute for Africa (Via Ulisse Aldrovandi 16, Rome) is the only agency destined by law to carry out the functions of a National Centre of relations with Africa on a cultural, economic, and social basis. Other Centres in Italy that are interested in particular geographic areas of the African Continent are the Centro per le Relazioni Italo-Arabe (Centre for Italo-Arab Relations) (Via Caroncini 19, Rome) and the Istituto per l'Oriente (Via Caroncini 19, Rome) whose attention is directed toward Mediterranean Arabic Africa and countries of the Asiatic Near East. There is in Milan (Via Santa Radegonda 8) the Gruppo Vittorio Bottego directed by General B. V. Vecchi that on a private basis promotes Italo-African relations in collaboration with the Centro Economico Italia-Africa della Camera de Commercio di Milano. Other interrelations on scientific and academic grounds are encouraged by some Italian universities also within the course of studies of the faculty of Political Science and Letters. In Naples there is the Istituto Universitario Orientale that pays a great deal of attention to Africa especially in the field of philology.

During the American Revolution, the British blockade succeeded in destroying virtually all of the Massachusetts navy, a considerable amount of the state's privateers and fishing vessels, and most of New Bedford's whaling fleet. At the end of the war, England closed her own ports, as well as those of her West Indian possessions, to American trade France and Spain similarly forbade American commerce with their West Indian colonies. In addition, the former American colonies themselves imposed state tariffs that discouraged coastwise trade.

The Manuscript Division of the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, contains the papers (about 1, 700 items) of James Gillespie Birney (1792-1857). Birney was active in the American Colonization Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society and in the publication of the Philanthropist, an antislavery journal.