ABSTRACT
Journalists and historians alike know that some of the best sources of information come from public records, documents that record things like vital statistics (birth, marriage, and death certificates); ways of life (e.g., census data, government reports on welfare and housing, economic indicators, or a consumer spending index); politics (voter registration records, papers of the presidents, senate hearings, congressional testimony); preoccupations (newspaper and magazine articles), and so on. In fact, one author writes that the best investigative journalists operate with a “documents state of mind,”1 believing that for every project, records exist…somewhere.
