The Storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then President Trump is one of the most documented individual episodes of mass violence in history.

As President-Elect Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, it is important to revisit the documentary record of the Storming of the U.S. Capitol. President-Elect Trump and his supporters continue to undermine the historical record of this event for their own personal and political purposes.

Social media platforms have amplified the ability of politicians such as President-Elect Trump to rewrite the historical record to serve their own political agendas. X (the former Twitter) has categorically opposed any fact-checking in order to serve Elon Musk’s personal political agenda and that of his far-right allies worldwide. It is telling that Facebook has just announced that it is suspending its (already inadequate) fact-checking services entirely. The New York Times reports on Facebook’s change in policy: “The social networking giant will stop using third-party fact checkers on Facebook, Threads and Instagram and instead rely on users to add notes to posts. It is likely to please President-elect Trump and his allies.”

Historians must continually address the politicized distortions of the historical record through archival collection and conservation, documentary research, academic publication, and public history diffusion of documentary evidence. Historians play a vital public role by documenting and interpreting past events, political actions, social movements, and everyday life based on a careful reading of the dense historical records of the past. Informed citizens and their societies rely on trained journalists and historians to access a documented and nuanced understanding of their present and past worlds.

The United States Congress has published documents from the Storming of the U.S. Capitol in several repositories.

The Library of Congress established a web archive on the Storming of the U.S. Capitol. The Library of Congress indicates: “On January 6, 2021, the U.S. Capitol was attacked by a crowd attempting to stop a joint session of Congress from certifying the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. The January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol Web Archive preserves a representative sample of websites related to the attack and its aftermath. The collection includes a selection of federal and state government websites, as well as sites from the military, law enforcement, advocacy groups, think tanks, academia, corporations, and the media.”

The Second Impeachment of President Trump was based on his actions, those of members of his administration, and those of his political supporters, during the Storming of the U.S. Capitol. The Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection is available online.

Lawfare also provides access to the Select January 6th Committee’s documents.

ProPublica published a large collection of first-person videos taken and diffused by participants in the Storming of the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021.

“As supporters of President Donald Trump took part in a violent riot at the Capitol, users of the social media service Parler posted videos of themselves and others joining the fray. ProPublica reviewed thousands of videos uploaded publicly to the service that were archived by a programmer before Parler was taken offline by its web host. Below is a collection of more than 500 videos that ProPublica determined were taken during the events of Jan. 6 and were relevant and newsworthy. Taken together, they provide one of the most comprehensive records of a dark event in American history through the eyes of those who took part.”

PBS reported on additional documents made available in 2024 by the prosecution in Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case.