Research Guides: HIST 712: US Civil War Era Research Seminar HIST 712 (Spring 2025): Government Materials

Databases

Full list of Government Document Databases
Full list of govdocs databases to which we subscribe

Highlights (Related to American History)

HeinOnline This link opens in a new window
Legal sources, including law journals, U. S. Code, U. S. Statutes at Large, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U. S. Supreme Court opinions and reports, Congressional Record, classic law texts, foreign policy documents, presidential documents, treaties, Virginia court briefs, English law history, and much more. Coverage: Varies by title.
ProQuest Congressional This link opens in a new window
Historic and current congressional information. Includes Committee Prints, Congressional Record 1789-2009, CRS Reports, Hearings 1824-present, Unpublished Hearings 1973-1992, House & Senate Documents and Reports, Legislative Histories, Executive Branch Documents 1789-1952, and the Serial Set. Coverage: 1789-present.

Serial Set, 1818-1964
The Serial Set contains documents used in Congressional Hearings. If a congressional hearing cited a document that was circulated in a meeting, it should be in the Serial Set.

Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Nexis Uni features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790 with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.

NOTE on the Serial Set

Many important government reports and publications end up in the Serial Set, which is an annual volume(s) of materials submitted to Congress. If a Congressional speech or hearing references a document or report, it will usually be in the Serial Set. If you see a citation like "House Document 14" in a 1850 Congressional debate, go to the 1850 Serial Set volume & look at document 14. Special Reports also go into the Serial Set.

Later in the 19th century, especially after the Civil War, new federal agencies develop and begin publishing their own reports too.

Worldcat & PRIMO

WorldCat This link opens in a new window
Materials held by thousands of libraries in the US and abroad. Books, websites, computer programs, films, slides, journals, magazines, papers, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, newspapers, sound recordings, videotapes, etc. Coverage: Before 1000BC-present.

Main Library Catalog
Direct link to the advanced search page of the main library catalog.

The best way to find government publications is to search by agency. There is no good subject heading to help narrow just to government materials.
Search the agency as the author, and narrow further by adding keywords & narrowing the publication date.

Example: "department of War" as author, Virginia as keyword, limited 1861-65
If I wanted to find Dept of War publications about Virginia during the Civil War, I'd search the War Dept as author, and keyword search for Virginia.
NOTE: Sometimes the agency is listed as "war department" and sometimes "Department of war." Look at the MARC record to see what the formal author term is. In this case, the official name is "United States. War Department"

You can also use "government printing office" as a keyword, which allows you to search across many agencies at once. The GPO is the printer for the whole federal government. This is not the best place to start because it is also listed as GPO, Gov. Pub. Office, and in the early 21st century it changed its name to Government Publishing Office.

HathiTrust & GoogleBook

Most state government publications, and nearly all federal government publications, are outside of copyright. This means most are freely available online via Hathitrust, Internet Archive, and GoogleBook. You can author search by agency in these websites to find their publications. Unfortunately it become hard to limit results.

I suggest identifying government publications in WorldCat, then searching the title of documents in Hathi & Googlebook; there is an extremely high likelihood the document is online. If it isn't check the main library catalog, which will search ProQuest Congressional & HeinOnline too.