The Congressional Record is the record of proceedings and debates on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. It's published daily when one or both chambers of Congress are in session, and a permanent, bound edition is published after the end of each session of Congress.
The Congressional Record first began publication in 1873, but it is preceded by three other publications: the Annals of Congress (1789-1824), the Register of Debates (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873).
While later volumes of the Globe began to provide something approaching verbatim coverage, most of these early publications only have paraphrased speeches, condensed reports, and summaries. For more background on these early publications, the Law Librarians' Society of Washington, DC has put together a helpful Overview of the Congressional Record and Its Predecessor Publications.
The Congressional Record (Bound Edition) is freely available online via GovInfo from 1873 through 2016. The daily Congressional Record issues dating from 1995 are freely available online via Congress.gov. The Congressional Record can also be accessed via subscription databases like HeinOnline, which may be available through a local library.
This post focuses on using the Congressional Record (Bound Edition) -- the permanent, bound edition published at the end of each session of Congress -- rather than the Congressional Record (Daily) edition. For more information on the differences between each publication, see the GovInfo 'About' pages on the Congressional Record (Bound Edition) and the Congressional Record (Daily).
Two access points for using the Congressional Record are the Index to the Proceedings and the History of Bills and Resolutions sections, which are always included at the end of each Bound Edition. Below are two scenarios walking through how to use the Congressional Record using these two access point. The first scenario is how to find information on a specific Member of Congress, and the second scenario is how to find information on specific legislation.
How to Find Information on a Member of Congress
For our first example, let's say you're looking for a 1947 speech given by Rep. John Davis Lodge -- a Representative who served in the House in the 80th and 81st Congresses. To search for a specific floor speech, start with GovInfo's Congressional Record (Bound Edition) landing page and scroll down until you find the Volume for 1947 -- Volume 93. The Index to Proceedings is always going to be towards the end of a Volume. In this case, it's in Volume 93, Part 14.
Open the PDF and scroll down until you see the 'L's and then look for 'Lodge, John Davis' (the entry starts on page 335). Under his name is a list of all the content in the Congressional Record related to Representative Lodge in that session -- here, it's the first session of the 80th Congress.
Under the heading 'Remarks by, on' on page 336 is a list of all the speeches Representative Lodge made on the floor of the House in that session. He made remarks on a number of topics, but let's say you're interested in the speech noted as 'American people: generosity, 11096'. The '11096' number is the page number in this Volume on which these remarks begin.
The difficulty in using GovInfo to access the Congressional Record, as opposed to a using subscription database like HeinOnline, is that from the Congressional Record (Bound Edition) landing page, it's unclear which Part of Volume 93 includes the page number 11096.
After some trial and error, you learn that page number 11096 is in Volume 93, Part 9 -- specifically, it's in pages covering December 5, 1947.
How to Find Information on Legislation
For our second example, let's say you want to dig into the legislative history of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Start with GovInfo's Congressional Record (Bound Edition) landing page and scroll down until you find the Volume for 1938 -- Volume 83. Open the Index to Proceedings from Volume 83, Part 12.
Scroll through the PDF until you hit the 'F's and then look for an entry on fair labor. On page 143 is an entry on 'Fair Labor Standards in Employments' under which is 'Bills to provide for the establishment of (see bills S. 2475*, 4175*; H.R. 10492, 10538, 10671).' These are all of the bills introduced in the 75th Congress on establishing fair labor standards.
Knowing these bill numbers, go back to the Congressional Record (Bound Edition) landing page and open up the History of Bills and Resolutions section in the same Volume -- it's also in Part 12.
The History of Bills and Resolutions opens with Senate bills -- start by looking up S. 2475. It's on page 416. This entry has the full title of the bill, the numbers of any published reports, and the pages on which there was floor debate on the bill. The entry also tells us the Public Law number -- PL 75-718 -- which means this is the bill that passed into a law establishing fair labor standards.
The text of Public Law 75-718 can be found in the Statutes at Large, which is freely available online through the Library of Congress (1st to 81st Congresses) and GovInfo (82nd to 113th Congresses).
What this entry doesn't tell us is when the bill was introduced or to which committee(s) the bill was referred, which means it was introduced in an earlier session in the 75th Congress.
Before we trace S. 2475 through earlier sessions of the 75th Congress though, we can keep looking through the History of Bills and Resolutions for the other bill numbers we have: S. 4175, H.R. 10492, H.R. 10538, and H.R. 10671.
The entries for these four bills lets us know that they were introduced and referred to the Senate Committee on Education and Labor and the House Committee on Labor, but there were no committee reports issued or floor debate on any of these bills -- they died in committee. Here's the entry for H.R. 10492 as an example.
Back to S. 2475, to trace this bill through an early session(s), start by going back to the landing page for the Congressional Record (Bound Edition) and look for the volume in the previous session of the 75th Congress.
On the landing page there are two Volumes for 1937, which means there were three sessions in the 75th Congress. There are typically two annual sessions, however occasionally there can be a third. To check on the dates of a session of Congress, the Senate website has a reference list.
Starting in Volume 82, open the History of Bills and Resolutions in Part 3.
The entry for S. 2475 shows that action was taken on the bill in the second session as there are many pages of floor debate listed. However the bill was not introduced here, so it must have been in the first session.
Go back once more to the landing page for the Congressional Record (Bound Edition) and open up the History of Bills and Resolutions section in the Volume 81, Part 11.
The entry for S. 2475 (starting on page 665) gives the full title of the bill, has information on which committee(s) it was referred to -- the Senate Committee on Education and Labor and the House Committee on Labor -- the pages on which the bill was debated on the floor, and the numbers of the published committee reports: S.Rpt.75-884 and H.Rpt.75-1452.
The first page number for floor debate here is 7596. As a reminder, finding that page in Volume 81 using GovInfo will take a bit of trial and error as it's unclear from the landing page which Part of Volume 81 includes that number.
Page 7596 is in Volume 81, Part 7 -- specifically, it's on the pages covering July 26, 1937.
To find the House and Senate report numbers listed in the History section on S. 2475 (ex: H. Rept. 2182), we recommend using ProQuest Congressional, a subscription database with the full text of the Serial Set. ProQuest Congressional may be available through a local library. The Serial Set is also freely available via HathiTrust (ex: see the full text of H.Rpt.75-2182), but it's a little more difficult to navigate.
After working through the Congressional Record, if you want to dig even further into the legislative history of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 you can take what you've learned and contact the Center for Legislative Archives. You can submit a request asking about a legislative bill files on S. 2475 and the four other related bills, and any committee papers on fair labor in the records of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor and the House Committee on Labor in the 75th Congress. We'd be happy to serve you these records in NARA's Washington, DC research room.
If you have any questions on how to use the Congressional Record, or about legislative records in general, please email us at legislative.archives@nara.gov.