Robert's Rules of Order has been the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure in the United States for well over one hundred years.  Originally entitled Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies and published in 1876, it is a collection of rules regarding parliamentary procedure that was written by then U.S. Army Colonel Henry Martyn Robert, a military engineer. It was inspired by his disastrous performance in leading a church meeting in 1863 at the First Baptist Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which erupted into open conflict on the issue of abolition.  Robert felt his inadequate knowledge of proper procedure was to blame, and so he assembled the book of rules loosely modeled after those is use in the United States House of Representatives, with adaptations for its design for use in more ordinary societies outside of legislative bodies. While the book is described as “a codification of the present-day parliamentary law”, and is widely adopted by organizations as the definitive reference for procedural conduct, it has no basis in either statutory law, common law, or court precedent. The fact that numerous organizations adopt it as their formal reference speaks to its clarity and thoroughness.

The book has been revised over the decades to accommodate cultural change. The Eleventh Edition was published in 2011 and contains rules governing such things as email, telephone conference calls, and video conferences. This reading is of the First Edition.