| Congressional Journals
Annals
of Congress
The Annals of Congress, formally known as The Debates and
Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, cover
the 1st Congress through the first session of the 18th
Congress, from 1789 to 1824. The Annals were not
published contemporaneously, but were compiled between
1834 and 1856, using the best records available,
primarily newspaper accounts. Speeches are paraphrased
rather than given verbatim, but the record of debate is
nonetheless fuller than that available from the House
Journal and Senate Journal
The
Congressional Globe
The Congressional Globe, commonly referred to as the
Globe, contains the debates of Congress from the 23rd
Congress, 1st Session through the 42nd Congress (1833-73).
There are 46 volumes in the series, printed as 110 books.
The volume-numbering scheme is not consistent throughout
the entire series, and for that reason citations to the
Globe should refer to the Congress and session number.
There are separate indexes for the Senate and House
proceedings for each session of Congress. The indexes
often appear in the front of the book and may be repeated
in each part. The Globe is the third of the four series
of publications containing the debates of Congress. The
first five volumes of the Globe (23rd Congress, 1st
Session through 25th Congress, 1st Session, 1833-37)
overlap with the Register of Debates. Initially the Globe
contained a "condensed report" or abstract
rather than a verbatim report of Congress's debates and
proceedings. With the 32nd Congress (1851), however, the
Globe began to provide something approaching verbatim
transcription. The contents of the appendix of each Globe
volume vary from Congress to Congress, but appendices
typically contain presidential messages, reports of the
heads of departments and cabinet officers, texts of laws,
and statements of appropriations. Speeches not indexed or
referenced on the pages reprinting the debates also
appear in the appendix. Each appendix has an index. The
Globe was issued by a commercial printer, Blair and Rives
of Washington, D.C. The copies were purchased for use by
the government and were thus considered government
publications.
Congressional
Record
The Congressional Record is the official record of the
proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It
is published daily when Congress is in session. The Wirtz
Labor Library has copies of the Congressional Record
beginning with Volume 1 (1873). Since March of 1985 the
fulltext of the Congressional Record can be found
electronically on both WESTLAW and LEXIS.
The
Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption
of the Federal Constitution
The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the
Adoption of the Federal Constitution were compiled by
Jonathan Elliot in the mid-nineteenth century. They stand
today as the best source for materials for the period
between the closing of the Constitutional Convention in
September 1787 and the opening of the first Federal
Congress in March 1789. On September 17, 1787, the
Continental Congress accepted the recommendation of the
Constitutional Convention and agreed to distribute the
proposed constitution to the states; each state was then
to elect delegates to a state convention to approve or
disapprove the new constitution. The Constitution would
take effect upon ratification by the conventions of nine
of the thirteen states.
Journals
of the Continental Congress The First Continental Congress met from
September 5 to October 26, 1774. The Second Continental
Congress ran from May 10, 1775, to March 2, 1789. The
Journals of the Continental Congress are the records of
the daily proceedings of the Congress as kept by the
office of its secretary, Charles Thomson. The Journals
were printed contemporaneously in different editions and
in several subsequent reprint editions. None of these,
however, include the "Secret Journals,"
confidential sections of the records, which were not
published until 1821. The edition presented here is the
complete one published by the Library of Congress from
1904-1937, based on the manuscript Journals and other
manuscript records of theContinental Congress in the
Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
The
Records of the Federal Convention of 1787
One of the great scholarly efforts of the early twentieth
century was Max Farrand's gathering of the documentary
records of the Constitutional Convention. Published in
1911, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787
contained the materials necessary for a study of the
workings of the Constitutional Convention. As Farrand's
introduction describes, at the close of the convention
the secretary, William Johnson, delivered all the papers
to the president of the convention, George Washington,
who turned the papers over to the Department of State in
1796. In 1818 Congress ordered that the records be
printed, which was done under the supervision of the
secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, in 1819. Farrand's
Records remains the single best source for discussions of
the Constitutional Convention. The notes taken at the
time by James Madison and later revised by him form the
largest single block of material after the official
proceedings, but the collection includes notes and
letters by many other participants, as well as the
various constitutional plans proposed during the
convention.
Register
of Debates
The Register of Debates is a record of the congressional
debates of the 18th Congress, 2nd session through the 25th
Congress, 1st session (1824-37). It is the second of the
four series of publications containing the debates of
Congress. There are fourteen numbered volumes in the
Register of Debates series. Each volume covers a session
but is arbitrarily divided into parts, resulting in a
total of twenty-nine books in the series. Each volume
contains a separate index for Senate and House debates
and for Senate and House speakers in the debates. These
indexes are repeated at the end of each printed part.
More complete access to the information may be obtained
indirectly by using the indexes of the House and Senate
Journals during the relevant session of Congress, which
provide the dates on which action was taken. These dates
can then be consulted in the Register of Debates. The
last volume in each session of Congress contains
Presidential messages, select committee reports, and the
text of laws. Each page has two columns, and each column
is numbered. The Register of Debates is not a verbatim
account of the proceedings, but rather a summary of the
"leading debates and incidents" of the session.
It was published contemporaneously with the proceedings
by a commercial printer, Gales and Seaton of Washington,
D.C. The copies were purchased for the use of the
government and were thus considered government
publications. The Register of Debates and its successor,
The Congressional Globe, overlapped publication for a
brief period of time (23rd Congress, 1st Session through
25th Congress, 1st session; 1833-1837).
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