Boley Blog

Boley Blog: Finding Presidential Papers

To celebrate Presidents' Day, here are some great resources for finding Presidential Orders, Proclamations, memos, and more.

The Federal Register publishes all Executive Orders, Proclamations, and some miscellaneous papers. The FR publishes them quickly and after signature a paper will usually be available in 1 to 2 days. The website begins in 1994 and has the papers of Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. For earlier Presidents, use the FR found in Heinonline's U.S. Federal Content.

For immediate release of Presidential papers, the White House's website is a great place to look. Orders, Proclamations, and papers are published here quickly and can be searched. Note the White House website only has information from the current administration.

The Code of Federal Regulations also publishes Executive Orders, Proclamations, and miscellaneous papers in Title 3 of the CFR. These are the same documents published in the Federal Register, however, they are all combined from the previous year in one place. Earlier versions of the CFR can also be found in Heinonline's U.S. Federal Content.

A great source for Executive Orders, Proclamations, and all of the combined papers of the President is UC Santa Barbara's The American Presidency Project. Here you can search for any type of Presidential paper, by date, President, type of document, or key word. With almost 147,000 documents, this resource is one of the first places to go for Presidential papers. It is especially useful when looking for documents that predate the CFR and FR. This is also a free database.

Looking for specific subject areas of papers? Heinonline has several specific databases, like the John F Kennedy Assassination Collection, U.S. Presidential Impeachment Library, and the U.S. Presidential Library.

Finally, ProQuest Legislative and Executive Publications has Presidential materials starting from President Washington in 1789 to the current administration. You can search this database by date, keyword, or President.