U.S. History

Updated regularly. Includes every legislative and executive document of the first fourteen U.S. Congresses. Complements the digital U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980. A source of primary material on wide-ranging aspects of early American history.

The Organizational Records and Personal Papers bring a new perspective to the Black Freedom Struggle via the records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle. The three major civil rights organizations are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.

Through records of Claude A. Barnett's Associated Negro Press, this module also branches out to cover other aspects of African American life in the 20th century, like religion, sports, education, fraternal organizations, and even the field of entertainment.

This Black Freedom module is highlighted by the records of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Africa-related papers of Claude Barnett, and the Robert F. Williams Papers. Rounding out this module are the papers of Chicago Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and records pertaining to the Mississippi Freedom Summer.

The National Security Archive is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University.Updated annually. The Digital National Security Archive includes 53 collections of declassified documents, consisting of over 94,000 indexed documents, with more than 733,000 total pages. Each of these collections, compiled by top scholars and experts, exhaustively covers the most critical world events, countries, and U.S. policy decisions from post World War II through the 21st century. Glossaries, chronologies, bibliographies, overviews, and photographs are included.

The National Security Archive is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University.

Updated regularly. Offers electronic documents made available by the Dudley Knox Library at the Naval Postgraduate School, searchable by keyword or by topic. Included are general U.S. policy documents, national strategy documents, theses and research papers from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security and the Naval Postgraduate School, and homeland security executive orders. Readers can also find notices of events and conferences pertaining to homeland security, as well as news items drawn from various sources.

The Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL) is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Grants and Training and the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL) is the nation's premier collection of homeland security policy and strategy related documents.

Primary source documents of investigations made by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) during the massive immigration wave of 1880-1930. The files cover Asian immigration, especially Japanese and Chinese migration, to California, Hawaii, and other states; Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1906-1930, and European immigration. There are also extensive files on the INS’s regulation of prostitution and white slavery and on suppression of radical aliens.

Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A: Subject Correspondence Files:

• Part 1: Asian Immigration and Exclusion, 1906-1913
• Part 1: Supplement: Asian Immigration and Exclusion, 1898-1941
• Part 2: Mexican Immigration, 1906-1930
• Part 3: Ellis Island, 1900-1933
• Part 4: European Investigations, 1898-1936
• Part 5: Prostitution and White Slavery, 1902-1933
• Part 6: Suppression of Aliens

Updated regularly. Contains legislative histories and links to the related full-text Congressional documents of more than 18,000 federal laws enacted since 1929. The fully-searchable PDFs include full text of the public law itself, all versions of related bills, law-specific Congressional Record excerpts, and committee hearings, reports, and prints. Also included are presidential signing statements, CRS reports, and miscellaneous publications that provide background information related to the making of the law.

Updated monthly. Offers a searchable full text digital collection of archival material from federal legislative, judicial and executive branch agencies. Contains over 7,500 titles, some 90,000 volumes, of interest to researchers in law and history.

An extensive collection of works on Military Law are included. Also included are a number of historical British Government publications about Iraq, Palestine and the Middle East.

Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.

A digital online archive of 22,000 legal treatises published in the United States and Great Britain between 1800 and 1926. Provides access to over 10 million individual page images. Includes works on British Commonwealth and American law, with 14,900 titles from the nineteenth century and 7,100 titles from the years 1900 to 1926. Covers nearly every aspect of law, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature, some very rare. The monographs and materials include casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches.

Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.

Designed to complement The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, this archive offers online access to state and municipal codes, documents relating to constitutional conventions, and other resources in American legal history. The term “primary sources” is used not in the historian’s sense of a manuscript, letter or diary, but rather in the legal sense of a case, statute or regulation.

Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.

Comprises over 10,000 titles and more than 2 million pages of fully searchable content, covering trial books from all countries and languages (although the great majority are in English and published in the U.S. or Great Britain); includes books covering multiple trials as well as books about a single trial. Based on the law libraries of Harvard and Yale, and of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, as well as some from the British Library. The category of "trials" includes unofficially published accounts of trials; official trial documents, briefs, and arguments where these were printed as separate publications; official, separately published records of legislative proceedings; administrative proceedings; and arbitrations (domestic and international).

Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.

Updated monthly. Bibliographic index with abstracts covering the full range of political, social, and public policy issues. Covers selected journal articles, books, statistics, yearbooks, directories, conference proceedings, pamphlets, reports, government documents, and microfiche. More than 1,600 journals and over 8,000 monographs are indexed each year. Includes documents published worldwide in any of six languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The subject headings and abstracts are in English.

The PAIS Archive database comprises a retrospective conversion of the PAIS Annual Cumulated Bulletin, Volumes 1-62, published 1915-1976. At completion of this conversion, the PAIS Archive contains over 1.23 million records.

Updated daily. Provides indexing of many Congressional publications from 1789 to the present, including Hearings, Committee Prints, Reports, Documents and Congressional Research Service Reports.

House and Senate Reports and Documents indexed in ProQuest Congressional (1817-1969) are available in full text in the Serial Set database. Our subscription to ProQuest Congressional does not include full text of the Serial Set.

Congressional Hearings after 2013 and House and Senate Documents and Reports indexed in ProQuest Congressional (1995 to present) are available in full text on Govinfo.gov site from the Government Printing Office.

Slavery and the Law is a collection of archival primary sources.

Series I: Petitions to State Legislatures offers access to important but virtually unused primary source materials that were scattered in state archives of Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The collection includes virtually all extant legislative petitions on the subject of race and slavery.

Series II: Petitions to Southern County Courts were collected from local courthouses, and candidly document the realities of slavery at the most immediate grassroots level in southern society. It was at county courthouses where the vast majority of disputes over the institution of slavery were referred.

Slavery and the Law also includes State Slavery Statutes, a master record of the laws governing American slavery, covering 1789–1865.

Updated regularly. Provides a digital reproduction of the United States Congressional Serial Set, consisting of the Reports, Documents, and Journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Content covers years 1817 to 1980.

The maps published as part of the U. S. Congressional Serial Set publications are also searchable. Includes all maps from 1817 - 1980.

Updated regularly. A full-text collection of declassified U. S. government documents. Includes correspondence and memoranda, minutes of cabinet meetings, technical studies, national security policy statements and intelligence reports. Coverage is from the years immediately following World War II through the 1970s. The major domestic and international events of the post-World War II world are covered in information by and for presidents, senators, and congress members.

Provides nearly 11 million pages of records and briefs from over 150,000 cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in the period 1832-1978. Also contains full-text search capabilities to more than 350,000 documents, including appellant's and appellee's briefs, oral transcripts, and petitions for writ of certiorari.

Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.

Primary source documents on the Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy from 1960-1975. Collections on the Vietnam War cover U.S. involvement in the region from the early days of the Kennedy administration, through the escalation of the war during the Johnson administration, to the final resolution of the war at the Paris Peace Talks and the evacuation of U.S. troops in 1973. Along the way, documents in this module trace the actions and decisions at the highest levels of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, as well as events on the ground in Vietnam, from the perspective of State Department officials, Associated Press reporters, and members of the U.S. Armed forces, including the Marines and the Military Assistance Command Vietnam.

A more detailed description of the contents of this collection can be found here.