Because Afghanistan remained on the periphery of Western awareness until the Soviet invasion in 1979, authoritative information on 20th-century Afghanistan, its internal affairs, and its role in world affairs has traditionally been widely scattered, hard to identify, and even harder to obtain. Now the scholar can investigate in detail the U.S. relationship with this emerging country during six critical decades. Documents in the collection date from the earliest official U.S. contacts in the 1920s to 1984. Selection of items was based on a bibliography compiled by Dr. Julian W. Witherell, chief of the Library of Congress' Africa and Middle Eastern Division.