The Library
The documentary record of American protectionism
A federated archive of 3,081 records spanning 1800–1958, organized into seven collections by publishing organization. 2,430 records are presently retrievable as full text. The archive is open and freely searchable.
Collections
Records of the American Iron and Steel Association and its trade journal Iron Age. AISA was the principal industrial body advocating for the protective tariff on iron and steel from the Civil War through the early twentieth century.
Unaffiliated protectionist works that fall outside the named organizational collections. Includes pamphlets, addresses, treatises, and periodicals defending the American System without a single institutional imprint.
Records published by the American Protective Tariff League and its journal of record, the American Economist. The League was founded in 1885 to defend the protective system established under Washington, Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln.
Publications of the Home Market Club of Boston, organized in 1887 to defend the protective system in New England.
Records of the Industrial League of Pennsylvania and its successors, founded in 1869 to advance protectionist policy from the manufacturing center of the republic.
Publications of the Fair Tariff League. A small but documented protectionist body of the late nineteenth century.
Imprint records under the Henry Clay name, including pamphlets and reprints issued in tribute to the architect of the American System.
A note on sources
The records in this archive are drawn from two principal sources: the Internet Archive, which provides scanned full-text copies of the great majority of titles indexed here, and the HathiTrust Digital Library, which holds a large additional set of records that we presently link to but do not host directly. Where a record was published before 1929 it is in the public domain in the United States; later issues remain under their original copyrights and are linked to authoritative copies rather than republished here.
The archive uses an over-inclusive scope at the indexing layer and a publisher-based collection rule at the cataloging layer. Some records remain in the residual collection until they can be reviewed and assigned to a named collection. Editorial review of the residual is ongoing.