State of the Union Address(es)

The State the Union Address that President Obama gave last night is the subject of many news articles and opinion pieces today, and whatever the writer's views, they all tend to take the giving of this address for granted, which is understandable, but one wonders, why do the presidents do this? Have they always? There's a great site online from the University of California, Santa Barbara, the American Presidency Project, that will help answer questions about the State of the Union Addresses, and it also has the full text of all of them, going back to the first one given by George Washington in 1790. It's such a great site that your blogger will add it to our Political Science research guide later today :-)