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analysis of Truman's presidency plummeted to being analytically unimportant and outdated but it remains an interesting and important look at Truman's formative years.
Steinberg was not alone in trying to make conclusions about the Truman presidency without the necessary primary resources. In the late 1970s a majority of the primary resource documents became available to researchers and the public from private and public archives. What was released in the later 1970s was ". . . one of the most informative runs-perhaps the most informative run-of manuscript records in the history of the American presidency." The release of Truman's presidential papers included confidential memoranda, un-sent letters, diary entries, and other never seen before documents written by the president's own hand. Most importantly, the Truman Presidential Library released the "Dear Bess" letters. Over the span of 49 years, Harry Truman wrote over 1000 letters to his wife, Bess Truman. These letters give the most insight to how Harry Truman viewed the world and his thoughts about current events. The release of these valuable primary resources was important to the historiography of Harry Truman because they paved the way for comprehensive and definitive works to be accomplished on the former president.

Until 1989, Truman at best had a piecemeal historiography. There were bits and pieces of Truman's legacy spread out over a wide array of disciplines. In 1989, G.K. Hall Company published The Harry S. Truman Encyclopedia. Edited by Richard S. Kirkendall, a leading Truman biographer, this work combines the work of nearly two hundred scholars and was designed to assist teachers and librarians with research. Considered a major scholarly work, The Harry S. Truman Encyclopedia was the first major attempt to combine the diverse universe of the Harry Truman legacy. However, The Harry S. Truman Encyclopedia was intended to only be used by scholars and teachers as an instructional guide. Furthermore, The Harry S. Truman Encyclopedia did not solve the problem of the piecemeal historiography of Harry Truman; it only organized the available tools to complete such a task. As Robert Ferrell stated regarding the status of works done on Harry Truman in 1990:
And yet the reader will have discerned a striking point about the place in history of Harry S. Truman as a public figure must rely on a remarkably insecure set of biographies.
Ferrell went on to say:
What this says is that the generality of historians should

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