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Sessions of Congress

By Abbie Bradfield Mulvihill

If you have to work with U.S. congressional materials, you probably find yourself having to convert congressional sessions into years. That's fine if you're dealing with the past 20 years, but beyond that, you may have to start staring at the ceiling to do the math. Instead, you should use a cheat sheet.

LLSDC has one (actually two - there is an old one floating around out there) with corresponding debate record volume numbers. LLSDC's is in PDF format and goes back to 1789. It's very good, but it gets a little wild with the Notes symbols (because the focus is on the volume number information).

THOMAS has a good layout (although it would be preferable if the list descended vertically instead of horizontally) that links to a nice calendar view. THOMAS's list only goes back to 1975, however.

So, after looking at those and a few others, I think the winning cheat sheet is the U.S. Senate's Dates of Sessions of the Congress, present-1789. The list includes recess dates for both houses and you can flip it to sort from 1789-present. Plus, you can easily link to the Sessions of Congress page for more information.

Full post as published by AbsTracked on August 28, 2008 (boomark / email).