U.S. History

Aggregates digital collections from around the U.S. and offers excellent tools to discover and explore them. Contributing institutions provide access to photographs, government documents, newspaper clippings, books, and other forms of ephemera. Focuses on 17th to 21st centuries.

A digital repository for the nation's research libraries, HathiTrust brings together the digitized book and serial collections of major universities and other partner institutions, a significant portion of which is in the public domain and available full text. Boston College's status as a partner makes it possible for members of the Boston College community to download any of the out-of-copyright items as PDFs.

Search every legislative and executive document of the first through fourteenth U.S. Congresses; also contains Executive Department materials. Covers political, social and military history, as well as cultural, ethnic and international studies. This database is the seminal set of U.S. government publications and a rich source of primary material

Modules 1-5, covering "Early Settlement, Expansion and Rivalries," "Towards Revolution," "The American Revolution, " "Legislation and Politics in the Colonies," and "Growth, Trade and Development." Collection will eventually include the full 1,450 volumes of documents from The National Archives, UK, covering the period 1606 to 1822. Full-text searching across all manuscript documents using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR).

Papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies, 16th-18th centuries.

Full text of significant English and foreign-language titles printed in Great Britain, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

The place to search or browse resources on American government, current affairs, history, politics, public policy, and data analysis for the social sciences. CQ Press resources include:

- Congress Collection: A data-rich research and reference tool that provides historical analysis of members of Congress, their legislative voting behavior, interest groups, and their interactions in crafting public policy.
- CQ Almanac: Authoritative analysis on the major legislation and actions of congress for each year since 1945. Unique data on the voting patterns of Congress members provide insight into the legislative process and history of the institution. Users can follow the history of a policy issue with the Policy Tracker tool which links reports on the same issue for almost 70 years.
- CQ Researcher Plus Archive: A database of in-depth, authoritative reports on a full range of political and social-policy issues extending back to 1923. Each report is footnoted and includes an overview, background section, chronology, bibliography and debate-style pro-con feature, plus tools to study the evolution of the topic over time.
- CQ Magazine: A weekly news magazine featuring in-depth reporting on public policy, politics, congressional legislation, and elections extending back to 1983, including: a complete wrap-up of news on Congress, the status of bills in play, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, committee and floor activity, debates, and all roll-call votes.
- Politics in America: The ultimate insider's guide to politics with authoritative information on each member of Congress and the district he or she represents.
- Supreme Court Collection: A blend of historical analysis, timely updates and expert commentary of Supreme Court decisions, biographies of justices, institutional history, and the U.S. Constitution. This database also contains extensive data on Court opinions and justice voting behavior that allows for easy quantitative analysis of the Court.
- Voting and Elections Collection: A database of elections data, authoritative analyses, concise explanations, and historical materials to help researchers investigate and understand voting and elections in America from 1789-present.

Chronicles matters considered on the floor, votes and other actions taken, in the House and Senate, as well as excerpts from executive department communications and member responses. Illuminates key moments in early American history and government as they occurred and influential decisions as they were made.

Provides access to hearings, published and unpublished from 1824 to the present, congressional committee reports, bills, public laws, selected committee prints, congressional documents, the Congressional Record from the 99th Congress forward, Federal Register from 1980 forward, the current Code of Federal Regulations, and the current US Code.

The United States Senate has maintained a record of its proceedings in executive session since its inception. This database captures matters related to confirming presidential nominees, consent to the making of treaties and much more.

A full text searchable collection of sources on all aspects of U.S. history compiled by Congress in numbered sequence (hence its name the Serial Set), including government reports, journals, hearings, messages, petitions, resolutions, monographs, treaties, presidential communications, maps and so forth from 1817 to 1980. Also includes the full text of the American State Papers (1789-1838).

Search every legislative and executive document of the first through fourteenth U.S. Congresses; also contains Executive Department materials. Covers political, social and military history, as well as cultural, ethnic and international studies. This database is the seminal set of U.S. government publications and a rich source of primary material

Retrospective catalog of U.S. government publications. Coverage 1895-1976.

Nexis Uni includes thousands of U.S. and non-U.S. news sources; legal materials: case law, statutes and law reviews; and company/business information. Focuses on 1980s to the present with some older content.

Includes "U.S. Federal Legislative History Library," which includes legislative histories for many important laws (PDF). Additionally the Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories database lists other legislative histories for many more laws. Some of the titles listed are hyperlinked in HeinOnline (PDF).

Includes "ProQuest Congressional Publications," which encompass compiled legislative histories for laws starting with 1969. The histories includes listings of all documents associated with the law, arranged by type of document. Recent histories typically link to the full text of the documents. This databases also has archival full-text of committee hearings from 1824.

Consists of 11 collections from the Harvard Law School Library, highlighting three United States Supreme Court Justices, the first Black federal judge, high-profile cases, and insights into developing ideologies and laws, as far back as 1861 with the Papers of Oliver Wendell Holmes, which span from the Civil War to the Great Depression. The Papers of Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter provide a behind-the-scenes view of the Supreme Court between 1919 and 1961. The Frankfurter Papers are of special note because they reveal how the Supreme Court approached the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Nearly 11 million pages of records and briefs brought before the U.S. Supreme Court, 1832-1978.

ProQuest History Vault module focused on 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. Papers of civil rights leaders included in this module are those of the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph; the long-time civil rights activist and organizer of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, and the papers of the pioneering educator Mary McLeod Bethune.

Papers of the NAACP Legal Department from 1956-1972. Topics covered include school desegregation, abuses of police procedure, freedom of speech, desegregation of public facilities, voting rights, housing discrimination, and employment discrimination.

Consists of 6 modules that provide a comprehensive view of the NAACP's evolution, policies, and achievements from 1909 to 1972. Contains internal memos, legal briefings, and detailed activity summaries from national, legal, and branch offices throughout the U.S, documenting the realities of segregation in the early 20th century to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and beyond.

This module is comprised of records of three important women's rights organizations: the National Woman's Party, the League of Women Voters, and the Women's Action Alliance. Originally a committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the National Woman's Party (NWP) was founded in 1913 when Alice Paul and her colleagues broke away from NAWSA in dissent over strategy and tactics. The Women's Action Alliance, established in 1971 as a grass-roots organization, concerned itself with issues such as employment and employment discrimination, childcare, health care, and education. The League of Women Voters collection documents almost every facet of women's involvement in U.S. politics from 1920 to 1974.

Collection provides access to over 750,000 pages of government documents from 1900 to 2008. Covering major policy issues from the period before the World War II into the twenty-first century, the archive serves as a convenient source for documents from government departments including Defense; State; Treasury; CIA; and the White House. U.S. Declassified Documents Online supports the study of history, politics, international relations, and journalism, among other fields.

Declassified documents on the most critical world events, countries, and U.S. policy decisions from post World War II through the 21st century

Declassified documents on the most critical world events, countries, and U.S. policy decisions from post World War II through the 21st century

The HSDC is a collection of documents related to homeland security policy, strategy, and organizational management. It contains documents from federal, state, tribal, and local government agencies, professional organizations, think tanks, academic institutions, and international governing bodies.

Covers the investigations made by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) during the immigration wave of 1880-1930, including immigration to the U.S. by Asians, Mexicans and Europeans, as well as extensive files on the INS's regulation of prostitution and white slavery and on suppression of radical aliens

Historical legal codes, statutes, regulations, and commentaries on codes from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and other countries in northern Europe. Included are crucial sources of historical statutes and regulations for the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, sourced from the law libraries of Yale, Harvard, and George Washington University.

Digital images of more than 21,000 legal treatises on 19th and early-20th century American and British Commonwealth law.

Published records of the American colonies, documents published by state constitutional conventions, state codes, city charters, law dictionaries, digests and more.

Historical legal trials, mostly from England and America, drawn from the historical print collections of the Harvard and Yale Law School Libraries and the Library of the Bar of the City of New York.