The Papers were the outgrowth of the Wilson Centennial Year of 1956 when a national effort to recall Wilson's many-faceted contributions brought to light the need of a full-scale edition of his papers. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation of New York, which had been founded in 1922 for the perpetuation of Wilson's ideals, led the way in meeting this need. The Foundation secured contributions with which to start the project and then suspended all its other activities in order to devote its own capital resources as needed to the completion of The Papers. Princeton University became cosponsor in 1959, assuming responsibility for housing the papers and for helping to care for its staff.
Arthur S. Link, author of the definitive biography of Woodrow Wilson, was appointed Editor of the Papers in 1958 and was called to Princeton as Professor of History in 1959. Associate editors from the early stages of the project have been John Wells Davidson, who served from 1958 until his retirement in 1972, and David W. Hirst, who has occupied that position continuously since the publication of the first volume. John E. Little has been associate editor since 1971.
The first volume appeared in the fall of 1966, and by the spring of 1978, twenty-six volumes had been published.
The Papers include most of the letters Wilson wrote and a substantial proportion of those he received, most of his speeches, samples of his classroom and lecture notes, all of his important articles, two of his books, central in the development of his political thought (Congressional Government and Constitutional Government in the United States), and his important political and diplomatic correspondence and other state papers. Volume 1 and Volumes 7 through 20, which cover Wilson's years as Princeton student, professor and president, constitute virtually a documentary history of the University, unique in the annals of American higher education.
The Papers also include transcripts of many of the shorthand notes Wilson made throughout his life, using the Graham method, now almost extinct. The editors had the good fortune to find several older Graham experts to make the transcripts and thus secure for posterity much important material that Wilson wrote in shorthand, including a remarkable diary he kept while an undergraduate at Princeton, which opens with the maxim: ``To save time is to lengthen life.''