The First Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, included representatives from all of the 13 Colonies except Georgia. Convened to discuss and address grievances to the British Crown and Parliament, the Congress elected Peyton Randolph as President and, as Secretary, Charles Thomson, who served in that capacity until the Federal Government was established in 1789. In contrast to the First Continental Congress, which adjourned October 26, 1774, after having been assembled less than 2 months, the Second Continental Congress met over a period of almost 6 years. Meeting for the first time on May 10, 1775, at Philadelphia, it convened successively at Baltimore, Philadelphia, Lancaster (1 day only), York, and Philadelphia.

With the final ratification of the Articles of Confederation on March 2, 1781, a new central government was created by a series of Confederation Congresses. The final business of the last Congress under the Articles was transacted October 11, 1788, and on March 4, 1789, the First Congress of the United States met in New York City.

It should be noted that the records allocated to this record group are not,

for the most part, organized in a manner that reflects the identity, structure, or function of each of the Continental and Confederation Congresses. They were arranged and bound by previous custodians, chiefly by type, such as journals, committee reports, correspondence, memorials, and petitions, and thereunder chronologically or alphabetically. In many instances the date span of individual series encompasses the Continental and Confederation Congresses. In addition, groups of closely related records and even parts of essentially the same body of documents are widely separated in the numbered series, while collections of unrelated records constitute a single volume of a series. It should not be assumed that all records of a given type are to be found in a particular series, nor that the title of a series always accurately reveals either its principal or its total contents.

Most of the records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses, 1774-89, are arranged in a numerical sequence of 196 series referred to as item numbers. The numbers 1-194 were assigned by William A. Weaver, a clerk in the Department of State, and listed in his Catalogue of Manuscript Books in 1835. The numbers 195 and 196 were added