The following is a guest post by Jacquelyn Deppe, an intern with the Digital Resources Division of the Law Library of Congress. She is a graduate student of the Masters of Information program at Rutgers University. International Coffee Day is celebrated in the United States on September 29, and internationally on October 1. According to …
Congress has dealt with issues of voter disenfranchisement on the basis of race throughout history. The question of suffrage for District of Columbia residents in 1844 demonstrated how the enfranchisement of D.C. residents and Black American men was interconnected. In that year, the Senate Committee for the District of Columbia, which held jurisdiction over D.C. from 1816 until …
The following is a guest post by Elina Lee, a library technician (metadata) in the Digital Resources Division of the Law Library of Congress. In honor of Labor Day, we decided to explore the early history of the federal minimum wage as shown through the United States Congressional Serial Set. According to Serial Set Vol. No. 6857 …
Every so often, the Digital Resources Division comes across a unique subject of debate. Most recently, the question of “the uniform or costume of persons in the diplomatic or consular service” caught our attention. (S. Exec. Doc. No. 31, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., at 1 (1860) reprinted in Serial Set Vol. 1031.) In an 1860 …
Post describing the 1950 “investigation on a Government-wide scale of homosexuality and other sex perversion” and highlighting parts of the report contained in the Library's Serial Set
Congressional documents preceding the Serial Set from 1789 to 1817 became the American State Papers. However, these documents were not collected and published until the 1830s, when “[t]he volumes of Congressional documents, [sic] [became] too numerous for easy reference, and we (Congress) [found] a great difficulty in keeping our (the) series perfect.” (H. Doc. no. 35, …