United States Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers, 1775-1938

by Ralph E. Weber

Overview

United States Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers, 1775-1938 is the first basic reference work on American diplomatic cryptography. Weber's research in national and private archives in the Americas and Europe has uncovered more than one hundred codes and ciphers. Beginning with the American Revolution, these secret systems masked confidential diplomatic correspondence and reports.During the period between 1775 and 1938, both codes and ciphers were employed. Ciphers were frequently used for American diplomatic and military correspondence during the American Revolution. At that time, a system was popular among American statesmen whereby a common book, such as a specific dictionary,was used by two correspondents who encoded each word in a message with three numbers. In this system, the first number indicated the page of the book, the second the line in the book, and the third the position of the plain text word on that line counting from the left. Codes provided the most common secret language basis for the entire nineteenth century.Ralph Weber describes in eight chapters the development of American cryptographic practice. The codes and ciphers published in the text and appendix will enable historians and others to read secret State Department dispatches before 1876, and explain code designs after that year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412814867
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	11/15/2010
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	660
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Ralph E. Weber

Table of Contents

1: Secret Communications; 2: Ciphers in the American Revolutionary Era, 1775–1789; 3: Book Codes and Repertories in the American Revolutionary Era 1775–1789; 4: Nomenclators in the American Revolutionary Era; 5: An Anxious Republic 1789–1801; 6: Experimentation, Expansion and Crises, 1801–1815; 7: Confidential Reports from Europe and Mexico, 1816–1848; 8: A New Generation of Codes

Editorial Reviews

At last! A professional historian has tackled American diplomatic cryptography—and the result is the first quantum leap forward in our knowledge of pre-World War II cryptology in more than a decade. For the first time someone has written a solid documentary study of the codes and ciphers used by the United States in the conduct of foreign affairs. It fills an important gap—and it sets an impressive standard for future historians of cryptology…Now that Weber has done this, nobody will ever have to do it again. United States Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers, 1775-1938 deserves that overworked adjective, “definitive.” —David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers and Hitler’s Spies

From the Publisher