NOTE: the references that follow  are for personal, educational use only and are not to be reproduced or distributed in any form without the permission of the copyright holder.
 

I. Introduction:

 
Using web-based resources:

Wikipedia with Caution

Wikipedia article on Alger Hiss (accessed June 22, 2006)

Wikipedia articles on Hiss related articles, especially the Venona documents and Anatoly Gorsky

The cornerstone of post-war American Foreign Policy:

George Kennan,  the "long telegram,"  February 1946 (transcription)
George Kennan,  the "long telegarm," February 1946 (original)
George Kennan, Foreign Affairs version of the "long telegram), 1947

Baltimore Boy Gone Bad?

Excerpts from the Johns Hopkins University 1926 yearbook with contemporary photograph.

Time Magazine, December 20, 1948

Speeches  by Adlai E. Stevenson on Alger Hiss and the United Nations from The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson "Let's Talk Sense to the American People," 1952-1955,  Volume 4, edited by Walter Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974, pp. 164-172.
 

Douglas Winder's Famous Trials  at www.umkc.edu/famoustrials(last accessed 2005/06/29), and specifically here.
 

The Alger Hiss Story (N.Y.U.) at http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/home.html (last accessed 2005/06/29)
 

III. Additional sources for classroom use:

Doreen Rappaport, The Alger Hiss Trial. New York: HarperCollins Children's Books, 1993.  Note that this is for educational use only and not for resale or redistribution.  While out of print, second hand copies can be obtained from the web and you are encouraged to purchase them for classroom use.
 

Father John Cronin's 1945 confidential report to Catholic Bishops on the threat of Communism in America.  For additional reading on Father Cronin, see John T. Donovan, Crusader in the Cold War: A Biography of Fr. John F. Cronin, SS (1908-1994), a dissertation at Marquette University, 2000.

Documents submitted in the Hiss trials that led to his conviction for perjury, purported to have been given to Whittaker Chambers by Hiss in 1938 with excerpts, table of contents of HUAC hearings.
 

View John Lowenthal, The Trials of Alger Hiss 165 min., released 1980, ISBN -1-55974-239-9, as excerpts and the whole documentary:

Lowenthal  excerpt

Feehan interpretation

The whole documentary as WMV files viewable through Microsoft's media player:

Part I

Part II

Part III

An inventory of a  psychiatrist's files 

H-Net

Supports Venona indictment of Hiss

John Earl Haynes, Library of Congress expert on Communism

Alger Hiss, 1980 article
  

For  Whittaker Chambers see his play,  his memoir Witness, and the definitive biography: Whittaker Chambers: A Biography  by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House (1997).

For the continuing controversy over documenting whether or not Alger Hiss was a spy see: The Mystery of Ales, by Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya, in the Summer 2007 issue of the American Scholar.

The bibliography of works relating to the Hiss/Chambers controversy is extensive and only barely touched upon here. Two recent studies which raise major questions about the ability of writers claiming to be historians  to objectively evaluate evidence include:

Susan Jacoby, Alger Hisss and the Battle for History,  Yale University Press, 2009

G. Edward White,  Alger Hiss's Looking Glass War, Oxford University Press,  2004.