Primary Resources - POLS 3123 - American Presidency - LibGuides at University of Arkansas

Digital Primary Source Collections

American Presidency Project
A broad collection of the most significant documents of the presidency. Search here for public papers, State of the Union addresses, inaugural addresses, press conferences, executive orders, proclamations, signing statements, debates, convention speeches, and much more.
Digital National Security Archive
A full-text database of 35 core collections of primary documents acquired by the George Washington University based National Security Archive. The collection has been acquired through extensive use of FOIA. Each core collection is focused on one topic, e.g. Iran-Contra, Terrorism and U.S. Policy. Each topical collection includes diverse policy documents supplemented by contextual and reference material on chronology, glossary and bibliography.
Internet Public Libraries' Presidents of the United States
In this resource you will find background information, election results, cabinet members, notable events, and some points of interest on each of the presidents. Links to biographies, historical documents, audio and video files, and other presidential sites are also included.
Presidential Recordings Program
Between 1940 and 1973, six American presidents from both political parties secretly recorded just under 5,000 hours of their meetings and telephone conversations. Through a combination of historical research and annotated transcripts the Miller Center's Presidential Recordings Program aims to make these remarkable historical sources more accessible to scholars, teachers, students, and the public.
Presidential Rhetoric
PresidentialRhetoric.com provides news, information, and resources for those interested in the study of the presidency from a rhetorical perspective. Focusing largely on contemporary presidential issues, PresidentialRhetoric.com assists researchers in locating recent information relating to American presidents, political communication, and rhetorical criticism.
Presidential Signing Statements
A “Signing Statement” is a written comment issued by a President at the time of signing legislation. Often signing statements merely comment on the bill signed, saying that it is good legislation or meets some pressing needs. The more controversial statements involve claims by presidents that they believe some part of the legislation is unconstitutional and therefore they intend to ignore it or to implement it only in ways they believe is constitutional. From Hoover - Obama.
Presidential Speech Archive
The Scripps Library, through cooperation with various presidential libraries, has been collecting some of the most important presidential speeches in American history. These speeches all have transcripts, and some are available in their entirety in audio or video.
Public Papers of the President of the United States
The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States contains material that was compiled and published by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration. It includes volumes covering the administrations of Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama. As subsequent volumes are published, they will be added online.
more...less...
Each Public Papers volume contains the papers and speeches of the President of the United States that were issued by the Office of the Press Secretary during the specified time period. The material is presented in chronological order, and the dates shown in the headings are the dates of the documents or events. In instances when the release date differs from the date of the document itself, that fact is shown in the textnote. To ensure accuracy, remarks have been checked against a tape recording and signed documents have been checked against the original, unless otherwise noted. Textnotes and cross references have been provided by the editors for purposes of identification or clarity. Speeches were delivered inWashington, DC, unless indicated. The times noted are local times.

Related Primary Resources

American Memory
Multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library of Congress's Americana collections.
CyberCemetary
The CyberCemetery is an archive of government websites that have ceased operation (usually websites of defunct government agencies and commissions that have issued a final report). This collection features a variety of topics indicative of the broad nature of government information.
Early Americas Digital Archive
The Early Americas Digital Archive is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.
Hathi Trust
Digitized books from several university libraries. About 1 million items are in the public domain.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive offers permanent access for researchers, historians and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. It includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. Includes Project Gutenberg.
Making of America
Primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction, including 1,600 books and 50,000 journal articles with images. Strengths are education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.
National Archives Digital Vaults
Includes approximately 1,200 digitized documents, photographs, drawings, maps, and film clips, as well as links to additional research resources within the National Archives.
White House Transition Project
Since 1997, the White House Transition Project has combined the efforts of scholars, universities, and policy institutions to smooth out the American presidential transition. WHTP bridges the gaps between the partisan forces engaged in settling elections and the decision processes essential to governing by providing non-partisan information about the challenges of the American presidential transition and the strategies for overcoming those challenges.
more...less...
It provides these and other resources to presidential campaigns, to the president-elect, and to the new administration. These resources include three separate report series providing a White House institutional memory, perspectives on past transitions, and advanced research covering special aspects of transitions and governing. The WHTP also provides unique analysis of the appointments process and a clearinghouse on other transition resources.

POLS 3123 - American Presidency: Primary Resources

Digital Primary Source Collections

Related Primary Resources