Executive Orders and Proclamations

What it does

Every executive order and proclamation Theodore Roosevelt signed as president — more than 1,500 documents — as an open dataset with a static JSON API, an explorer, and embeddable widgets. Each record has a plain-language summary, categories, places, states, citations to the Statutes at Large and the American Presidency Project, and a text where one exists.

More than 500 documents carry sourced notes on reception, political impact, and legacy, and nearly 200 present-day parks, forests, refuges, and other places are traced to the document that began them on a Then and Now page. Every text is labeled by how it was checked: collated word for word against a primary printing, or a working copy from a digitization or volunteer transcription.

What it can do

• 1,111 executive orders and 410 proclamations, reconciled across four source lists
• Static JSON API and CSV, rebuilt on every push
• 114 public stories written from verified research entries
• Then and Now: present-day places traced to the documents that created them
• Links between documents that modified or revoked one another
• Verification status on every text, with page-image links
• Embeddable widgets and cross-links to Day by Day

Make it your own

Start by forking the repository into your own organization. Everything below assumes you are working in your fork, not this one.

1. Use the API directly: start at /api/v1/index.json. The data is CC BY 4.0; the source documents are public domain.
2. To build another president's set, fork the repo and replace the catalogs in sources/, following docs/methods.md.
3. Record every date or title correction with its source in data/corrections.json.
4. Run python pipeline/build_dataset.py and python pipeline/build_api.py.
5. Enable Pages through GitHub Actions; the workflow builds site/api on every push.

Stuck on a step? Open an issue on the repository. Questions from people adapting these for their own institution are the most useful feedback we get.