Presidents Day

Instead of going to the mall for the Presidents Day sale this year, you can really celebrate by brushing up on some presidential history. A great place to start is U.S. Presidents which provides biographical information, historical documents, and audio and video files. If this doesn't satisfy your historical sweet tooth, check out the Presidential Documents Archive at the American Presidency Project which has digitized over 85,000 documents related to the Presidency, including audio and video. Still not enough? The Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections contains detailed national results of all U.S. presidential elections since 1789. Other great sites include the Presidential Historians Survey and Famous Presidential Speeches. And if you want to compare today's presidential campaigns with those of the recent past, browse the Museum of the Moving Image's site The Living Room Candidate where you can find more than 300 commercials from every presidential election since 1952. Of course, the library has many great books on the presidents — both biographies of individual presidents and histories of the office.