This guide is designed to help American University users find the public and private papers (published and unpublished, print format or electronic) of U.S. presidents. It includes their letters, communiques (many previously classified), speeches, remarks, and statements. This guide generally does not include books written by the presidents. Many papers are published in more than one publication, in which case, only larger or more authoritative publications are included.
Acknowledgements: The contents of this guide are largely derived from the excellent "Public and Private Papers" by the Scripps Library, University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs and the Library of Congress' "Presidents of the United States: Resource Guide."
These resources are compilations of presidential papers found in our library catalog. Additional, more specific, resources are listed on each president's page.
Search Tip: For a more complete list of publications by individual presidents (not just their papers), search for the president's name as "Author/Creator" or "Author" (e.g. Washington, George) using the Advanced Search in the American University Library Catalog (on our library homepage) or WorldCat (in our database list).
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897
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Public papers of the Presidents of the United States.
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Speeches of the American Presidents
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Wills of the U. S. Presidents
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OCLC WorldCat is a catalog of holdings from libraries around the world - containing entries for books, videos, journals, recordings, and more - over 43 million records. Each record has a link to the American University interlibrary loan request form.
NOTE: WorldCat is NOT a database of research articles.
ArchiveGrid is a database of archival finding aids from libraries, museums, and archives. It helps identify archival materials such as historical documents, personal papers, and family histories and where they are.
** Currently, this database can only be accessed when connected to the secure campus network (includes AU VPN). **
HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward this collection under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests. HathiTrust holds the largest set of digitized books managed by the academic, research, and library community.
Digitized images of 22,000 British and American legal treatises from 1800 to 1926. They include books, casebooks, practice books, pamphlets, letters, speeches, essays and other works about the making of law, but not the transcript of actual laws or actual cases.
Updated in real-time, Voxgov provides access to social media feeds, press releases, publications, and documents from all branches of the federal government. Content from individual representatives and agencies officials is also included.
The Library of Congress, GovInfo, and the National Archives include many primary and secondary sources related to US presidents. This list contains sources for many different US presidents, including links to specific presidential libraries.
