On this day, 215 years ago, Congress met in the Capitol Building for the first time. The Sixth Congress established the residence of the Congress and seat of the United States government in Washington, D.C. with the move on November 17, 1800. The newly established United States had nine capitals between 1776 and 1800: Philadelphia, …
On a recent trip to Philadelphia, I stopped at the Eastern State Penitentiary. Opened in 1829, this was the most famous and expensive prison of its time. Tourists and researchers came from around the world to study this innovative prison system, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens. Eastern State Penitentiary was famous because it …
Last year, we added Statutes at Large to our Digitized Material page. Initially, each Congress from 1789-1950 had a webpage that included a large PDF file of all statutes for that congressional session. Then we began splitting the large PDF documents into smaller pieces, which meant that we had to browse each statute, add metadata to …