Political Science: Home

Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. We conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. We do not take policy positions.

Statement of Purpose
Statement of Purpose and Document Inclusion Policy
The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. We do not intend to mount only static text but rather to add value to the text by linking to supporting documents expressly referred to in the body of the text.

The Avalon Project will no doubt contain controversial documents. Their inclusion does not indicate endorsement of their contents nor sympathy with the ideology, doctrines, or means employed by their authors. They are included for the sake of completeness and balance and because in many cases they are by our definition a supporting document.

The online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives

EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History is a digital history portal that offers links to online facsimiles, transcriptions, and translations of European primary historical sources.

Links to full texts of books available at this site will be listed here. The texts are also integrated within the overall structure of the Sourcebook. This listing is to aid compilers of web guides to online books, etc.

The books that tend to have been put online here, or those that have been linked, tend to be those entire books that are often assigned to students in college classes to be read along with the more usual excerpted texts.

The mission of the Loeb Classical Library, founded by James Loeb in 1911, has always been to make Greek and Latin literature accessible to the broadest range of readers. The digital Loeb Classical Library extends this mission into the twenty-first century.

About the National Archives of the United States
General Information Leaflet, Number 1

Anyone who has cleaned out a family attic knows the importance of keeping family records. You may have military records from relatives who served in one of the World Wars—or even the Civil War. Or pictures of your great-great grandparents on the day they became American citizens. Or the canceled check that paid for your first home.

Now imagine the task of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—the nation’s record keeper.

Many people know the National Archives as the keeper of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. But we also hold in trust for the public the records of ordinary citizens—for example, military records of the brave men and women who have fought for our country, naturalization records of the immigrants whose dreams have shaped our nation, and even the canceled check from the purchase of Alaska.

In a democracy, records belong to the people, and for more than eight decades, NARA has preserved and provided access to the records of the United States of America. Records help us claim our rights and entitlements, hold our elected officials accountable for their actions, and document our history as a nation. In short, NARA ensures continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and the actions of their Government.

The Online Library of Liberty is provided in order to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals by making freely available on the internet the classic texts in the classical liberal and free market traditions.