Mapping Early American Elections is a web archive and interactive repository of Congressional voting data from the colonial era created and curated by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Over the span of fifty years, Philip Lampi, of the American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University and largely of his own scholarship collected and organized paper voter records from the early American Colonies. This data has been collated and digitized and made available in many forms through this website.
A collection of essays, blog posts, and interactive maps, the website is well organized. While the data may be overwhelming, there are adequate primers on navigating the site, reading and interpreting the maps and data available and relevant discussion posts and essays that highlight the purpose of the project and more nuanced material concerning the nature of early American elections and politics at large. Four simple tabs at the top right – ESSAYS, MAPS, BLOG and DATA (and ABOUT) – make navigation simple and intuitive.
The Essays and Blog posts give both direction and context. The Maps themselves are very interesting. They enumerate the voting results of the first 19 National Congresses and are organized by year then by state, as well as offering the national map. States are broken down by county by voter counts and voter party affiliation. The maps are color-coded for easy identification of results without further investigation necessary.
Most interesting to me, is the availability of the raw data used to compile the resultant maps. I am a bit of a database nerd so any collection of raw, cross referenced data gets me excited to do analysis. It is a testament to the spirit of scholarship to make such data available to all who are curious without requiring formal requests or tucking it behind a pay wall.
The team of researchers is discrete but dignified. Just eight academics and a web developer are responsible for the site – along with the indispensable scholarship of “consultant” Phil Lampi. The site, overall, is compelling enough to encourage further scholarship. I was immediately interested in looking up the ins and outs of the political philosophy of the now-defunct political parties that dominated the early era. Too, I was compelled to compare political orientation with slave populations as illustrated by another of Lincoln Mullen’s projects: “The Spread of U.S. Slavery, 1790–1860.”
In all, this is a robust site that is well-organized and user-friendly. The data is available in its raw form but it most effective in their decision to populate and color-code maps to illustrate the results.
