Skip to Main Content

Government Documents

The Presidents

  • American President
    Profiles of each of the presidents, with overviews of their families, elections, administrations, affairs, and key events. Produced by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
  • The Presidents
    A list of all of the US presidents with a brief overview of their administration. Produced by whitehouse.gov
  • White House Schedule
    The president's daily calendar from whitehouse.gov
  • The Miller Center is a nonpartisan institute that seeks to expand understanding of the presidency, policy, and political history, providing critical insights for the nation’s governance challenges.

Presidential Elections

  • The American Presidency Project
    A large collection of information by and about the presidents, including daily and weekly compilations of presidential documents, messages and papers of the presidents, inaugural addresses, proclamations, signing statements, approval ratings. See the section on Elections for convention speeches, presidential debates, party platforms, and voting data.
  • The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2012
    An online exhibition of hundreds of television commercials from every presidential election year since the beginning of televised campaign ads.
  • Debate Transcripts (Commission on Presidential Debates)
    Unofficial transcripts of most presidential and vice presidential debates from 1960 -
  • Electoral College (NARA)
    Explore the history of elections and voting, with historical election results and state laws and requirements.
  • Presidential Election Maps
    These maps show electoral votes won by political party for each of the elections from George Washington in 1789 to Barack Obama in 2012.
  • Presidential Inaugurations
    From the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, a collection of primary source documents relating to the inaugurations of each of the presidents, including their inaugural addresses. Additional sources for inaugural addresses are the Public Papers of the Presidents (listed below) and the American Presidency Project (listed above).
  • History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1984
    Includes texts of campaign, debate, and acceptance speeches.

Public Papers

Public Papers of the President  

A compilation of the messages and the papers of the presidents, 1789-1897  

A compilation of Presidential documents 1993- present  --  The Compilation of Presidential Documents collection consists of the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents and the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents which are the official publications of materials released by the White House Press Secretary

Executive Orders

Executive orders are official documents, numbered consecutively, through which the President of the United States manages the operations of the Federal Government.

The text of Executive orders appears in the daily Federal Register as each Executive order is signed by the President and received by the Office of the Federal Register. The text of Executive orders beginning with Executive Order 7316 of March 13, 1936, also appears in the sequential editions of Title 3 of the Code of Federal Regulations. *