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Institutional Membership

Thank you for your interest in becoming an institutional member of the Mary Ferrell Foundation!

At the core of this website is our massive, over 2 million page archive of primary resource documents covering the deep history of the 1960s and 1970s, including the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, and the ensuing intelligence agency investigations of the mid-70s.

An institutional membership with the MFF will give your college or university institution-wide access to the website, its advanced and powerful search capabilities, and the comment system.

We invite you to explore the following small sampling of the MFF's materials, and if you have any questions, or would like to learn more about an institutional membership, please contact us at info@maryferrell.org.


The MFF Archive

Mary Ferrell Foundation Archive

The MFF Archive contains a vast array of digital documents, books, essays, multimedia, and more concerning the assassination of President Kennedy and other political leaders, as well as other turning points in recent American history.

Over 50% of the documents in this archive have only been declassified since 1997.

DOCUMENTS

Document collections come from varied sources. A primary source of our materials is the Assassination Archives and Research Center. Other materials come from History Matters, JFK Lancer Productions & Publications, the National Archives, and other organizations and individuals.

The MFF currently has over 2 million pages of scanned government records, most of them copies of records in the JFK Records Collection, which is maintained at National Archives II in College Park, Maryland. Also online are growing collections on the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

For authenticity and best access to the original format, pages are presented as scanned images, not converted to text. Our custom viewing engine allows searching the text associated with each page image, and can even highlight search hits on the viewed pages.

MULTIMEDIA

The Multimedia portion of the MFF Archive contains photographs, audio, and video. These are organized into collections and available to all for browsing.

Photo collections are scanned from photos made available by the JFK Library & Museum, National Archives, and other organizations. They are presented in thumbnails - click on any thumbnail to view a larger version.

Audio collections of investigative interviews and other audio recordings come from the National Archives and other sources. Our own Unredacted series of interviews with authors and experts is part of this archive. Each is available for listening in .mp3 format.

Video includes the MFF's own taped interviews and productions, including our Withheld In Full series of documentary shorts. The Video Archive also features a portal to videos available elsewhere on the internet, primarily YouTube and Google Video

BOOKS

Several hundred books have been scanned and entered into the MFF Book Archive, and organized into general topic categories. Books may not be read online, due to copyright restrictions, but limited fair-use searching is available.

The Mary Ferrell Foundation Press is dedicated to bringing back into print classic works and important government reports which are no longer easily available. These paperback books may be ordered online in the MFF Store, and are also available on amazon.com.


Walkthroughs

Walkthroughs

These walkthroughs present a structured, often chronological, collection of documents and other materials from the MFF Archive. These topic-based walkthroughs showcase documents organized around a particular topic.

Warren Commission Executive Sessions

The executive sessions of the Warren Commissions, originally stamped Top Secret but declassified after legal battles, provide a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of the Commission, reveal its political motivations and constraints, and provide clues to some of the mysteries of the JFK assassination.

Vietnam in Late 1963

This document walkthrough presents some of the more important and interesting documents related to Vietnam policy in the second half of 1963. The documents come from Defense Department files declassified in 1997, State Department FRUS volumes, and Church Committee files.



Starting Points

Starting Points

America's history after World War II is marked by several turning points, where a single event changed the course of history. For many of these events, particularly the political assassinations of the 1960s, the official explanations are lacking in credibility. Explore the evidence, history, and unexplained stories associated with these turning points.

Freeing the JFK Files

Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK closed with the following message:

A Congressional Investigation from 1976-1979 found a "probable conspiracy" in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and recommended the Justice Department investigate further. As of 1991, the Justice Department has done nothing. The files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations are locked away until the year 2029.

In the wake of the film, Congress was besieged by the public and quickly passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 to remedy this situation. What happened after that? Are the JFK files now all public? Is the government still hiding documents about the assassination, till 2029 or beyond?

What is the story behind the decades-long struggle to free the JFK files?

Intelligence Agency Investigations

The Watergate scandal, the fall of President Richard Nixon, and the election that fall of a "reform Congress" set the stage for Congressional investigations into illegal activities and other abuses by US intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI and CIA.

A Presidential commission and several Congressional committees, the most famous of which was headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, held hearings and produced reports over the next few years. Some of the findings of the Church Committee led to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Eventually these efforts waned, in part due to pushback from the intelligence agencies and their allies, particularly after the CIA station chief in Athens was murdered following the publicizing of his name (these committees were not responsible for the leak). With the election of conservative Ronald Reagan in 1980, the partially successful efforts at reform drew to a close. But lessons learned from those investigations are especially relevant today.

Projects

Projects

The Mary Ferrell Foundation showcases special projects which further research into the JFK assassination and other events in modern history. These are often interactive projects, and there are plans for future participatory projects as well.

CIA Cryptonyms

CIA documents are peppered with "cryptonyms" - AMLASH, JMWAVE, ODENVY, PBPRIME, AMCLATTER-1, etc. In many cases, the persons, organizations, or projects to which these codenames refer is public information. In others, it can be inferred from context. This page provides a handy look-up chart for decoding crypts seen in CIA documents. Source references are provided to corroborate the provided definitions. Bookmark this page for use as you read CIA documents.

JFK Database Explorer

The JFK records released since 1994, more than 300,000 of them, include a header sheet of metadata: title, date, subjects, etc. This metadata is collected in a database maintained by the National Archives. The MFF has built a sophisticated search-and-filter tool from this data, enhanced and including links to read the actual documents online.


How it Works

Institutional memberships function like Pro memberships - except no sign-in is required - for all users within the ip address ranges for a given university or institution. That means unlimited searches and pdf downloads of documents.

Pricing is customized based on the size of the institution, but generally ranges from $500 to $1,500 annually.

For more information and to sign up, please contact us at info@maryferrell.org.

Search the Archive

Try a few searches of the MFF archive, consisting of over 1.3 million pages of scanned documents, several hundred books, a searchable photo collection, and more.

 

How to Search

Testimonials

"When doing history, there is no substitute for digging into the primary sources. And this is especially true when studying the iconic contentious issue - the Kennedy assassination. The Mary Ferrell Archive is a huge boon to research and teaching about the assassination. Before we got it, research was vastly more cumbersome and less efficient. It has a very large proportion of the most important documents about the assassination (and closely related issues) as well as excellent search tools. My students and I use it extensively. It's absolutely invaluable.

- John McAdams, Associate Professor, Political Science, Marquette University


"The Mary Ferrell website is simply invaluable. I use it often, and I'm always amazed at the new discoveries that await. I can't imagine doing research without it."

- Lamar Waldron, author "Ultimate Sacrifice" and "Legacy of Secrecy"


"The Mary Ferrell website is a national historical resource. Easy to navigate for beginners and scholars alike, the site's unparalleled collection of records on the assassination of John F. Kennedy is the perfect antidote to the secrecy and confusion that still enshrouds the worst U.S. intelligence failure between Pearl Harbor and September 11."

- Jefferson Morley, author "Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA"


"The full resources of the Mary Ferrell site are nothing less than indispensable. If you have an interest in Cold War-era history and want to work from facts, from original sources - then there is simply no comparable alternative. You will be far better served by this collection of real documents than by the morass of information (and misinformation) found on the Internet and even in many books. If you are serious, you need to be using this resource."

- Larry Hancock, author "Someone Would Have Talked"


"The MFF site is the best resource online for research into the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. After forty years, the trial transcripts and LAPD and FBI investigation files are finally online and the compelling reasons to reopen the case are clearly detailed for all to see."

- Shane O'Sullivan, Writer/Director "RFK Must Die" and author "Who Killed Bobby?"

A Whimsical Video

This short video, Online Research & You, details how the Foundation's powerful 21st century digital resources can be of use to you and your students.


About the Website

Use the links below to find out more about the MFF Archive and how to use it.

About the Archive
Learn more about the MFF Archive, what it contains, and how it's built.

Document Archive FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions about the document archive.

How to Read an FBI File
Contains invaluable information in making sense of FBI records.

Help
Need help? Start here.

Site Map
A quick guide to the entire site.

About Our Organization

About Us
An overview of our mission.

About Mary Ferrell
Learn more about the woman who inspired this website.

Our Contributors
The Mary Ferrell Foundation thanks everyone who has helped supply us with documents, or aided us in other ways.

Mary Ferrell Foundation Press
The Mary Ferrell Foundation Press publishes, in paperback form, classic works on the JFK assassination and hard-to-find government reports.

Press Room
Writing about the MFF? Please check our Press Room for useful information.

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