The James K. Polk Project, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is
pleased to announce that all twelve published volumes of the “Correspondence
of James K. Polk” are now available online. This open-access edition,
published by Newfound Press, makes important primary-source documents on the
politics, diplomacy, economics, science, and culture of the antebellum
decades easily accessible to scholars and students.

The volumes can be found at http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_polk/.

Edited consecutively by Herbert Weaver, Wayne Cutler, Tom Chaffin, and
Michael David Cohen, the volumes feature annotated letters from July
1817–July 1847. They document Polk’s years as a University of North Carolina
student; a lawyer and plantation owner; a member of the Tennessee
legislature; a member of, and Speaker of, the U.S. House of Representatives;
Tennessee’s governor; and the eleventh U.S. president. The Mexican-American
War and the developing conflict over slavery are among the many topics covered.

Two more volumes remain to complete the series, covering the second half of
Polk’s presidency and his three-month retirement. Volume 13, which will
bring the series through March 1848 and the end of the war, will be released
in hardcover by the University of Tennessee Press later this year.