Official Websites
- Compilation of Presidential Documents -- from 1992 to the present, this collection consists of the Weekly Compilation and the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, the official publications of materials released by the White House Press Secretary. The Compilation is published by the Office of the Federal Register and National Archives and includes proclamations, executive orders, speeches, and White House announcements.
- Executive Orders -- contains information about Executive Orders beginning with those signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and are arranged according to Presidential administration and year of signature. The directory is compiled and maintained by the Office of the Federal Register editors.
- Founders Online -- through this website, you can read and search through thousands of records from president George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison as well as Benjamin Franklin. Founders Online also includes transcriptions of thousands of documents that have not yet appeared in the published volume.
- Presidential Library System -- the purpose of the fourteen official presidential libraries managed by the Office of Presidential Libraries, which resides within the National Archives, is to consolidate documents and artifacts of a president and his administration for the public and research community. Digital exhibits are updated often and are excellent sources for primary resources. One can search within each library or across all presidential libraries.
- Public Papers of the Presidents -- each Public Papers volume contains the papers and speeches of the U.S. presidents that were issued by the Office of the Press Secretary. The material is presented in chronological order. The appendices in each Public Papers volume provides listings of the President's daily schedule and meetings, when announced, the President's nominations submitted to the Senate; a checklist of materials released by the Office of the Press Secretary that are not printed full-text in the book; and, a table of Proclamations, Executive orders, and other Presidential documents released by the Office of the Press Secretary and published in the Federal Register. Currently, site contains the Public Papers for Presidents George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
- The Whitehouse -- the official website of the White House.
Official Websites--Executive Agencies
Official Websites--Independent Agencies
Official Websites--Boards, Commissions, and Committees
Specialized Resources
- American Presidents: An Online Reference Resources -- a comprehensive collection of material about the Presidents of the United States and the history of the presidency. This web site features essays about the President's life before, during, and after each presidential term. It additionally provides information about the First Lady and cabinet officials of each administration.
- The American Presidency Project -- online resource that has consolidated, coded, and organized into a single searchable database thousands of archival documents and government publications on the Executive Branch. Included is a comprehensive, searchable directory of presidential proclamations from Washington to Trump.
- Connecting Presidential Collections – housed at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, this is an open access, centralized website where researchers and learners can search across presidential collections. Users can browse by president or location. The site allows searching across the Miller Center’s extensive collections, presidential libraries maintained by the National Archives, plus state historical societies, museums, and university collections that contain presidential digital collections.
- Commission on Presidential Debates -- an organization established in 1987 to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners.
- "I Do Solemnly Swear . . .": Presidential Inaugurations -- a collection of approximately 400 items or 2,000 digital files relating to inaugurations from George Washington's in 1789 to Barack Obama's inauguration of 2009. The site includes diaries and letters of presidents and of those who witnessed inaugurations, handwritten drafts of inaugural addresses, broadsides, inaugural tickets and programs, prints, photographs, and sheet music.
- Living Room Candidate [copy and paste this link: http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/] -- contains more than 300 unedited commercials, from every presidential election since 1952. The site includes a searchable database and features commentary, historical background, election results, and navigation organized by year, type of ad, and issue. There is a transcript for each ad and a feature that allows visitors to search the entire database by title and by words in the transcripts.
- Miller Center The Presidency -- a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history. Site includes access to a unique collection of Secret White House Tapes, we eavesdrop on presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, a collection of famous presidential speeches, the Presidential Oral History Program that preserves the voices of members of past presidential administrations, and profiles of all presidents. Site also includes information about programs and research sponsored by the center.
- POTUS: Presidents of the United States -- an online directory where you can find background information, election results, cabinet members, notable events, and some points of interest on each of the presidents. Links to biographies, historical documents, audio and video files, and other presidential sites are also included.
- ProQuest Executive Branch Documents -- offers an extensive collection of searchable full-text documents produced by the Federal government from 1789-1939. In addition to offering a record of Federal department and agency activities, this collection provides insight into virtually all facets of society.
- United States Presidential Orders of Clemency – a comprehensive listing of all pardons granted by United States' Presidents from Washington to Trump. The only president not represented in the data is James A. Garfield. In total, the dataset contains 77 variables and 32,026 cases. The data includes variables that provide the recipient's name of the pardon, the date the pardon was granted, the offense committed, details regarding fines and prison stays, along with other details regarding the recipient. The data is distributed and preserved by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [ICPSR].
Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.