The Eagle and the Shield: A History of the Great Seal of the United States

Richard S. Patterson and Richardson Dougall's The Eagle and the Shield, A History of the Great Seal of the United States, published by the US Department of State in 1978, is the standard documentary history of the Great Seal, covering the three successive design committees Congress convened between 1776 and 1782 and Charles Thomson's own explanation of the final design, submitted to Congress in 1782, of the seal's symbolism including the unfinished pyramid and the eye above it. Its strength is that it is a government commissioned history drawing on the State Department's own archival records of the seal's design process, the primary institutional source for how the seal actually came to be. Its limit is that it documents the seal's official design history rather than the later popular and conspiratorial readings that have attached themselves to its imagery, so a claim about those later interpretations needs a source addressing that separate reception history.