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Our Commentary

The Teachers’ Unions’ Own Record

The NEA & AFT Historical Archive

Original page scans and searchable text from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, beginning with the NEA’s annual proceedings, 1890–1940. Free to read, download and cite.

  • 29 series
  • 1,010 volumes, issues and reports
  • 134,129 scanned pages
  • 1869–1963 years covered
Browse all series NEA proceedings by year About, methodology & rights

How to use the archive

Search.
The search box looks for words in the text of the scanned pages; tick Titles only to search titles, series and years instead. How searching works: whole words, phrases in quotes, and why the machine-read text misses some words.
Browse by series.
Each series has its own page, listed by year. Every volume, issue or report has its own page with the scan, the text file where there is one, the source and a ready-made citation. The NEA annual proceedings have a page for every year from 1890 to 1940.
Read the scan.
The PDF scan is the authoritative copy. The text comes from machine reading (OCR) and has errors, so check any passage against the page image before you quote it.
Cite the original.
Cite the volume or issue and its printed page number. The cite box on each page shows how.
Check the license.
Most items are public domain in the United States. 33 later NEA items, marked CC BY-NC, are shared under a Creative Commons non-commercial license instead. Their pages give the license and the attribution to keep with any copy.
Tell us about errors.
If you find a mislabeled year, a bad page or a transcription problem, write to us through our contact page.

Why we built this archive

The Educational Freedom Institute built this archive to put the primary-source record of the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, in researchers’ hands. It began with the NEA’s annual proceedings, 1890–1940, and now also holds other NEA journals, bulletins and reports, and AFT publications, among them The American Teacher. We post every volume we can, in full. Topic pages and indexes, as they are added, are aids to reading. The volumes themselves are the record.

EFI advocates for education freedom. This archive is open to anyone, of any view, who wants to read what these organizations printed.

Scholars cite these volumes, but few readers see them whole. Copies sit in different libraries and digital collections, under shifting titles, with gaps and mislabeled years. We gathered them into one year-by-year run so anyone can read what was said and check what others say was said.

What’s included

Every count below is read from the published file manifests.

Online now

National Education Association

24 series, 802 volumes, issues and reports, 126,990 scanned pages, 1869–1963.

Proceedings, yearbooks and indexes

Journals, bulletins and news

Departments

Commissions, committees and research

NEA annual proceedings: 50 of the 51 years, 1890–1940, about 27.0 million words of text. 1906: the Fiftieth Anniversary Volume, 1857–1906 (vol. 44A); no meeting was held that year, and this volume serves as the 1906 volume.

Online now

American Federation of Teachers and other teachers’ unions

5 series, 208 volumes, issues and reports, 7,139 scanned pages, 1903–1963.

Not yet online

NEA proceedings for 1931 and after 1940

1931: no open scan exists. We treat the volume as public domain, and we will add it as soon as we can obtain a scan. Later volumes will join the same series as open copies are found and their rights are reviewed.