Every factual claim published on this site carries a source a reader can check without our help. How the sources appear depends on the item. The standing dossiers under THE RECORD close with a numbered list under the heading SOURCES -- THIS PAGE, giving enough detail (speaker, publication, date, document) to locate the original. The wire-feed entries, the shorter dated items that make up the running log, carry their sources as links in the text: to the reporting, the document, the recording, or the post itself. The standard behind both is the same. A claim we cannot point a reader to does not run.
Not all sources weigh the same, and we rank them. Primary documents come first: roll-call votes, party platforms, executive orders, court records, film and audio of the speaker saying the words. Contemporaneous reporting comes second: what the wire services and the daily papers printed at the time. Memoirs, retrospective interviews, and secondhand recollections come last; a quotation recalled decades after the fact is an anecdote, not a record, and this site treats it as one.
Quotations are verbatim or they are described, never reconstructed. Words inside quotation marks appear in the cited source exactly as printed or recorded. Where the original language is slurred or offensive, we describe what was said and point the reader to the archived audio or film rather than reprinting it. We do not compress, clean up, or improve anyone's words, including our own.
Two quotations that circulate widely in this subject area do not appear on this site, by policy. The first is a remark attributed to Lyndon Johnson predicting how a certain group of voters would behave for two hundred years; it rests on a single secondhand account published decades later and cannot be verified. The second is a remark about the drug war attributed to Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, published posthumously in 2016, disputed by his family, and absent from every contemporaneous record. Both are discussed in section IV of our Southern Strategy dossier. The documented record is damning enough; it needs no help from the unverifiable, and it gets none here.
When no usable photograph exists for an entry, this site runs a single-panel editorial cartoon drawn in the idiom of the mid-century newspaper page. These are commissioned illustrations, produced for this publication, and every one is labeled EDITORIAL CARTOON -- COMMISSIONED ILLUSTRATION in its caption line. They are our own cartoons in a period style. They are never presented as archival artifacts, and no cartoon puts invented words in a real person's mouth. Where a cartoon we publish is a genuine archival one, its caption says so and names the artist, the publication, and the date.
Photographs carry a credit line naming their source and, where the license requires it, the photographer and the license. That rule governs everything this site publishes now, and it is met on every photograph in the standing dossiers. It is not yet true of the whole archive. This site ran for years before it was rebuilt, and a number of photographs carried over from those years have no provenance on file. We are working through them one at a time: each is credited once we can establish where the picture came from, or it is replaced. Until that work is done, some older entries carry a caption that describes the photograph with no credit beneath it. That is deliberate, and it is the honest state of the file. We would rather publish a photograph with no credit, and say so here, than print a credit we cannot stand behind.
Errors are corrected in place. When a factual error is found, the text is corrected where it stands and a dated note is set at the head of the entry, marked down its margin with a red rule: the word CORRECTION, the date the correction was made, then what the entry said before, what it says now, and how the error arose. The note stays there permanently. We do not silently rewrite the record, and we do not unpublish an entry to make a mistake go away. A site whose whole argument is the record cannot afford to.