I just finished reading Roy Morris Jr.’s intriguing book Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876, so a blog post on presidential databases—in an election year at that!—seemed fun. Instead of listing several, I thought I would focus on two in particular that have captured my interest.
The American Presidency Project, hosted by University of California, Santa Barbara, claims to be “the only free online searchable database including all of:
• Donald Trump’s Twitter 2015-2021.
• The Messages and Papers of the Presidents: 1789-1929.
• The Public Papers of the Presidents: Since 1929.
• The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents: 1977-2009.
The “nonprofit and non-partisan” site has an intuitive, easily-navigable layout and a powerful search feature. For example, I performed a basic keyword search for “smallpox” that retrieved 172 records. Each instance of the keyword is displayed in a results list that is conveniently sorted by date from oldest to newest. It even provides a snippet of context for each record:
President Taft’s “Message to the Congress on Affairs in Porto Rico” in 1909 mentions the eradication of smallpox on the island in the context of several other improvements the United States government had made since 1899, such as the construction of roads, public schools, and other accomplishments. President Taft lists these accomplishments in an attempt to convince Congress to pass “an amendment to the Foraker Act,” which he believed would solve an ongoing legislative “emergency” in the island’s local government. This kind of search in “APP” shows how it can be helpful for historical research in a variety of academic fields.
The Library of Congress’s Presidential History: A Research Guide is another resource I have been enjoying in preparing this post. It hosts a wide variety of digitized primary sources such as paintings, photographs, broadsides, and correspondence. The collection in this guide that I focused on is devoted to New York’s own Martin Van Buren, the seventh President of the United States.
The Van Buren Collection “contains more than 6,000 items dating from 1787 to circa 1910.” One of the sections of his correspondence contains a letter he wrote early in 1836, the year he was elected President:
It’s a challenge to read mid-ninteenth century cursive, but this letter contains Van Buren’s thoughts regarding the Pennsylvania legislature’s nomination of William Henry Harrison for President: “Although the Harrison nomination in this state has carried with it the great body of antimasons of the state, and nearly all the Whigs out of Philadelphia, I am nonetheless well informed that besides open seceders among the antimasons, there is uneasiness and discontent with a considerable class of them, at least [?] inwardly. My letter aims at reaching this class . . .” This letter shows him reaching out to as many constituencies as possible in the runup to the election later that year.
As you can see, there’s one major difference between the American Presidency Project and LOC’s Presidential History site—the former has transcribed documents, whereas the LOC site hosts the scanned primary materials without transcription.
I selected Taft’s message that mentioned smallpox from an interest in medical history, and Van Buren’s letter because he was not only a fascinating New York politician, but I have also visited his NPS National Historic Site!
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