About, methodology & rights

EFI Research Archives

What this archive is

The EFI Research Archives hold primary sources on how American public schooling was built, 1852–1969. They are organized in three parts:

The unions’ own records: what the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers printed, from the NEA’s annual proceedings to the AFT’s magazine, The American Teacher.
Government records: the annual reports of the U.S. Commissioner of Education and the federal and state records of the Blaine amendments and compulsory schooling.
Topics & features: guided readings that pull documents together on one subject.

We post every volume we can, in full. Topic pages and indexes are aids to reading; the volumes themselves are the record. EFI advocates for education freedom, and this archive is open to anyone, of any view, who wants to read what was printed and enacted.

Until October 2026 this archive was called the Union Archives. Citations that use that name point to the same pages.

Sources

Every file comes from a public digital collection. Each volume or item page names its source and identifier and links to the original as provenance.

Internet Archive (archive.org) supplied the scans and OCR text for 45 volumes of the NEA annual proceedings and 954 items in the other NEA and AFT series, many digitized from university library copies. It is also the source of the Commissioner of Education reports, many of them National Library of Education scans.
GovInfo (govinfo.gov), the U.S. Government Publishing Office’s collection, supplied a Bureau of Education bulletin in the NEA series and the Congressional Record volumes in the Blaine collection.
The Library of Congress supplied the Supreme Court opinions (United States Reports).
Google Books supplied the scans for the NEA annual proceedings of 1895, 1921, 1923, 1924 and 1925, which are not on Internet Archive, and 4 items in the other series. For Google Books scans, the plain text comes from the text layer built into the Google scan. Where the first PDF page is Google’s usage notice rather than part of the original, the volume or item page says so, as on the 1895 proceedings.
HathiTrust (hathitrust.org) holds many of the same volumes. We used its catalog records to confirm volume numbers and years, and list its copies as alternates. We did not download files from HathiTrust.

Where the government scans come from: Annual Reports of the U.S. Commissioner of Education: Internet Archive 153, GovInfo 4; Blaine Amendments and Compulsory Schooling: Internet Archive 85, GovInfo 7, Library of Congress 3, Hawaii State Archives 2, State Library of Oregon 1, Alaska State Legislature 1. 3 more entries link to their copies at Digital Library of Georgia, ERIC (U.S. Department of Education) and Internet Archive.

Two formats: the scan and the text

The original scan (PDF) is the authoritative copy. We post it byte for byte as the source published it.

The plain-text file is for searching. It was produced by optical character recognition (OCR), a machine reading of the page images, and is uncorrected.

Searchable copies. Some scans have no built-in text layer. For the 1890, 1894 and 1896 proceedings, the volume page now opens Internet Archive’s searchable PDF of the same scan, and links the original image-only scan beside it. For 16 items in the other series, we made a searchable copy ourselves by adding an OCR text layer to the scan. Both are made from the same page images as the original scan, which remains the authoritative copy.

Second copies. Where a second scan of the same item fills gaps in the first, the item page shows the more complete copy first and links the second copy below it.

How we verified the files

For the NEA annual proceedings, we added a volume only when both the scan and the full text were on hand, and we read each title page to confirm the year, volume and meeting. In the other series, 2 items have the scan without a separate text file, and the item page says so. Internet Archive downloads were checked against the file sizes (and, for later batches, the checksums) that Internet Archive publishes.

About OCR: check the scan

OCR makes mistakes. Letters are misread, words run together, page headers land mid-sentence, and tables come out scrambled. In the 1916 text, for example, “qualities” appears as “quaHties” and “possibility” as “possibiUty.”

Some volumes print simplified spellings, such as “thru,” “publisht” and “developt.” Those spellings are in the original print.

Before you quote a passage, find it in the scan and quote from the page image. Cite the printed page number, which can differ from the PDF page number.

Searching the archive

Text or titles. A search looks for the words printed on the scanned pages. To search only titles, issue details, series names and years, choose Titles only, or follow the “Search titles only” link above the results. Searching the text needs JavaScript and a current browser; without them you get the titles search.
Whole words. In the text of the scans, words match whole: teacher does not find teachers, so search for each form you need. In titles, the start of a word is enough.
Phrases. In the text of the scans, put a phrase in quotation marks to find the words side by side, e.g. "child labor". Without quotation marks, every word must appear on the same page, in any order.
Filters. Advanced search narrows either kind of search by series, organization, years, item type and rights.
Page links. In text results, each page link opens the PDF at that page. The number printed on the page is shown too, where it could be read.
OCR spelling. The text was read from the scans by machine (OCR) and is not corrected, so some words are misread or split at line ends, and older spellings differ (to-day, school-house). If a word finds nothing, try another spelling or a shorter phrase, and check every quotation against the scan.

Rights and the public domain

We treat every volume of the NEA annual proceedings as public domain in the United States, on one of two bases.

1890–1930: public domain by date. The U.S. copyright term for works published in 1930 or earlier has expired.

1931–1940: public domain because no record of copyright was found. Volumes from these years needed a notice, a registration and a renewal to stay protected. For 1932–1940, our scans show no notice, and we found no registration and no renewal. For 1931, we found no registration and no renewal; with no viewable scan, we could not check the volume itself for a notice. The 1931 volume is not yet online; no open scan exists.

Our searches covered the Catalog of Copyright Entries, the Copyright Office’s online records and card catalog, and published renewal databases. These are findings of no record found. Some searches relied on OCR or transcriptions, and the card-catalog index is incomplete. Material reprinted inside a volume, such as a poem or an excerpt from another publication, may carry its own rights. Each volume page states its basis.

The other series. Each item page states its own basis, with the details under “How we reached this.” Items published in 1930 or earlier are public domain by date, and Bureau of Education bulletins are also U.S. government works. Later items needed a copyright notice and a renewal to stay protected; we treat one as public domain only where our searches of the renewal records found no renewal, or where the item carries no notice.

Government records. Federal publications, including the Commissioner of Education reports, the Congressional Record and the Supreme Court opinions, are public domain in the United States as U.S. government publications. Each item page states its own basis, including for state laws and convention records.

Items under a Creative Commons license. 33 later NEA items, marked CC BY-NC, are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license, as granted by the National Education Association, directly or through George Washington University Libraries. We do not rely on the public domain for these items. Material by others that the NEA reprinted in its news releases is not covered by the license. Their pages show the license and the attribution text to keep with any copy, and they may be used only for non-commercial purposes.

If you believe any item here is not in the public domain or not licensed as stated, write to us through our contact page. We will review it promptly and remove it while we do, if the concern is substantial.

Corrections

We want this archive to be accurate. If you find a wrong year, a missing or damaged page, a broken link, a citation error or a rights concern, write to us through our contact page. Tell us the year, the PDF or printed page number and what you found. We review every report, fix confirmed errors, and list significant corrections with their dates in the changelog below.

How to cite

Cite the original volume or issue and its printed page numbers. Each volume page of the NEA annual proceedings has a cite box with Chicago, APA and MLA citations and a short form. Pages in the other series have Chicago, APA and MLA citations too.

Example (paper in a volume): Putnam, Helen C. “The New Ideal in Education—Better Parents of Better Children.” In Addresses and Proceedings of the Fifty-Fourth Annual Meeting Held at New York City, July 1–8, 1916, 240–45. Vol. 54. Ann Arbor, MI: National Education Association, 1916. Internet Archive, addressesproce1916natiuoft.

Short form: NEA, Addresses and Proceedings 54 (1916): 240.

Checking a file

Each volume or item page lists the SHA-256 checksum of its files. Each series also has a SHA256SUMS.txt file, and its manifest.csv lists every file with its size and source; both are linked at the foot of the series page. For the NEA annual proceedings, they are SHA256SUMS.txt and manifest.csv, and the searchable copies of the 1890, 1894 and 1896 volumes are listed in SHA256SUMS-r2.txt and manifest-r2.csv.

To check one file, run sha256sum on it (on a Mac, shasum -a 256) and compare the result with the value on its volume page. To check several at once, keep the files in year folders as they are on our file server (for example 1916/nea-proceedings-1916-v54.pdf), put SHA256SUMS.txt next to those folders, and run: sha256sum -c --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS.txt

The unions’ own records

The NEA holds 24 series, 1869–1963: the annual proceedings for every year from 1890 to 1940 except 1931, its journal and research bulletins, department bulletins, committee and commission reports, and press releases. The AFT group holds 198 issues of The American Teacher, 1912–1940. That run has gaps: no issues are online for 1922–1925, and some other years are incomplete. The same group also lists American Federation of Teachers pamphlets and reports (5 items, 1921–1962), American Federation of Teachers locals (1 item, 1963), Chicago Teachers’ Federation (2 items, 1903–1908) and Margaret Haley’s Bulletin (2 volumes, 1925–1926). The Chicago Teachers’ Federation helped found the AFT in 1916 as its Local 1, and withdrew in 1917.

Government records

The annual reports of the U.S. Commissioner of Education run from Henry Barnard’s first report of 1867–68 to fiscal year 1968: 152 reports, plus 5 alternate copies linked from the main copy’s page. No reports are online for 1869. The Blaine Amendments and Compulsory Schooling collection holds 103 documents, 1852–1969. It covers the 1875–76 Congressional Record, state constitutional conventions, Thorpe’s compilation of the state constitutions, the state laws that first required attendance, Oregon’s 1922 Compulsory Education Bill, Meyer v. Nebraska, Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Farrington v. Tokushige, and Bureau of Education surveys of school law. Oregon’s 1922 abstract of votes is listed but not yet located.

Topics & features

Topic pages pull together documents from across the archive on one subject. Each entry is cited to the printed page and links to the scan, so it can be checked against the volume itself.

Changelog

October 8, 2026: NEA annual volumes 1890–1940 published (50 volumes; 1931 not yet online).
October 7, 2026: 28 more series added, with 960 NEA and AFT volumes, issues and reports; searchable copies of the 1890, 1894 and 1896 proceedings added.
October 11, 2026: topic page published: The NEA, the AFT and Eugenics, 1901–1938: A Documentary Record.
October 26, 2026: Annual Reports of the U.S. Commissioner of Education published (152 reports, plus 5 alternate copies, 1867–1968).
October 26, 2026: Blaine Amendments and Compulsory Schooling published (103 documents, 1852–1969).
At launch: renamed the EFI Research Archives (formerly the Union Archives). All addresses are unchanged.