Some vols. include supplemental journals of "such proceedings of the sessions, as, during the time they were depending, were ordered to be kept secret, and respecting which the injunction of secrecy was afterwards taken off by the order of the House."

The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)

The ten original essays commissioned for this book focus on historical subjects in the post-World War II American West. The late Gerald Nash, in whose honor the essays were written, made major contributions to the study of modern American and western American history, and his impact on those fields is demonstrated in these essays by several generations of his students and colleagues. Emphasizing social and cultural developments, the essays draw on methodologies and topics from comparative history, environmental history, urban history, and political history. The authors write on subjects ranging from women's rights to urban sprawl, from organized religion to tourism, from mining to American Indian culture. An autobiographical essay by Nash himself situates his life's work in the context of two formative experiences: his intellectual development as a German refugee arriving in New York in the late 1930s and his commitment to the study of the American West when he began graduate school. The contributors include Margaret Connell-Szasz, Arthur R. Gómez, Donald J. Pisani, Marjorie Bell Chambers, Carol Lynn MacGregor, Christopher J. Huggard, Roger W. Lotchin, and Gene M. Gressley, as well as Nash and the volume editors.

From 1855 to 1856 in western Oregon, the Native peoples along the Rogue River outmaneuvered and repeatedly drove off white opponents. In The Rogue River Indian War and Its Aftermath, 1850–1980, historian E. A. Schwartz explores the tribal groups' resilience not only during this war but also in every period of federal Indian policy that followed. Schwartz's work examines Oregon Indian people's survival during American expansion as they coped with each federal initiative, from reservation policies in the nineteenth century through termination and restoration in the twentieth. While their resilience facilitated their success in adjusting to white society, it also made the people known today as the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians susceptible to federal termination programs in the 1970s—efforts that would have dissolved their communities and given their resources to non-Indians. Drawing on a range of federal documents and anthropological sources, Schwartz explores both the history of Native peoples of western Oregon and U.S. Indian policy and its effects.