Alaska has now been added to the Indigenous Law Portal on Law.gov. As I mentioned last summer, the Indigenous Law Portal is a free resource that brings together digitized collection materials from the Law Library of Congress as well as links to tribal websites and primary source materials found on the web. We have added […]
Today marks the 157th anniversary of the Homestead Act becoming law. For a number of years before the Civil War, there had been interest in allocating public lands in the trans-Mississippi west to individual settlers, but for a variety of reasons, including arguments over the status of slavery in the territories and concerns by Northern […]
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was created by then Secretary of War John C. Calhoun on this day, March 11, in 1824. After Congress abolished government-run trading houses in 1822 (3 Stat. 679, chap 54 (1822)), Calhoun appointed Thomas L. McKenney as the first commissioner of Indian affairs in 1824, to fill the void […]
On Monday, December 10th, 2018, the Law Library of Congress invites you to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the UN adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a panel discussion, “Repatriating Native American Cultural Property and Remains.” Repatriation is the process whereby specific kinds of American Indian cultural items in a museum collection are […]
We just passed the two year anniversary of when THOMAS was retired to make way for Congress.gov. Robert recently shared our second set of enhancements that we had for Congress.gov in June. One area where we have focused is on enhancing committee data. With this release we are adding a legislative interest column to the House: Legislation with […]
The individual statutes for congresses 68 through 81 are now available on the Law Library of Congress website. This addition closes the gap for the years for which the Statutes at Large were not available on the Internet. As with the volumes for previous congresses, each of these statutes is tagged with tailored, descriptive metadata […]
This has been a great year for Congress.gov. In 2016 Congress.gov page views jumped more than 20% over 2015. The jump in 2017 was even bigger, with over 90% more page views than the previous year! We also saw our first day with more than a million page views. Our @Congressdotgov Twitter account is closing in on 50,000 […]
Last month kicked off the first Congress.gov Tip, Top, and New post. Today, we’re bringing you the new Congress.gov enhancements for September, as well as a search tip and the latest most-viewed bills. Search Tip Adrienne Keys continues to share helpful search tips on Congress.gov. A recent tip was to remind users that the default search operator […]
This week’s interview is with Walter Foggie. Walter is the facility design and space planner here in the Law Library of Congress. Describe your background. Originally from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I have lived in Maryland since 2010. I served on active duty with the U.S. Air Force as a civil engineer operations manager where my service […]
A little more than a year ago, I wrote about our national bird, the eagle. The eagle appears on the United States Great Seal and the post briefly discussed the design process for that seal under the Continental Congress. The process spanned over 6 years, involved three separate, specially appointed congressional committees, and an […]