Historical federal legislative history research just got a little easier.  For the last few years, the Library of Congress has been working to add the Bound Congressional Record to Congress.gov.  It is now available all the way back to 1873, when the Bound Congressional Record started, to 1994. With the daily edition, which is available from 1995 to the present, users can now search the complete run of the Congressional Record using the free Congress.gov.

Screen shot of the Congressional Record

The Bound Congressional Record is a compilation of the Daily Congressional Record issues that were published during a session of Congress. It is a permanent and comprehensive collection of all the proceedings and debates that occurred during a specific session.

At the end of each session of Congress, all of the daily editions are collected, re-paginated, and re-indexed into a permanent, bound edition. The primary ways in which the bound edition differs from the daily edition are continuous pagination; somewhat edited, revised, and rearranged text; and the dropping of the prefixes H, S, and E before page numbers.