“Constituent case files provide important information on the effects of government on the populace and the manner in which government interacts with them.”

Sir John Seeley, in his book The Growth of British Policy (1895), wrote, “History is past politics, and politics present history.” In their work to document recent history, archival, and special collections, repositories strive to document government at the local, state, and national levels. Historians, journalists, social scientists, and other researchers are discovering these modem political collections to be vast and rich sources of information on contemporary society.