Mapping Early American Elections

FAIN: PW-234776-16

George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444)
Sheila A. Brennan (Project Director: July 2015 to April 2018)
Lincoln A. Mullen (Project Director: April 2018 to August 2019)

The geo-coding of records from 23,607 elections in the United States from 1787 to 1826, compiled for the resource “A New Nation Votes” (NNV), for use with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), along with the production of 84 interactive maps of national and state elections as well as tutorials and contextual essays to facilitate use.

This project builds upon the NEH-funded "A New Nation Votes" (NNV) project, by expanding access to the early American election returns in the form of spatial data, easy-to-understand maps, and tutorials. The team will add to NNV resources by preparing an extended dataset including historical spatial information that will allow the team to map elections returns. We will publish 84 interactive maps of local, state, and national elections, accompanied by quantitative visualizations. Explanatory text alongside the maps will help a wide range of users understand the visual representations of the data, while encouraging users to explore the spatial data to answer their own questions. We will also develop tutorials to teach researchers, journalists, and interested citizens how to map the data for themselves. By inviting researchers to actively participate in tracing the evolution of American democracy, we hope to encourage citizens to become more engaged in local, state and national elections.

Associated Products

Mapping Early American Elections (Web Resource)
Title: Mapping Early American Elections
Author: Mapping Early American Elections project team
Abstract: Mapping Early American Elections offers a window into the formative era of American politics by producing interactive maps and visualizations of Congressional elections from 1787 to 1825. The project makes available the electoral returns and spatial data underlying those maps, along with topical essays on the political history of the period and tutorials to encourage users to use the datasets to create their own maps.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://earlyamericanelections.org/
Primary URL Description: The main project website
Secondary URL: http://earlyamericanelections.org/essays/01-mullen-introduction.html
Secondary URL Description: An introductory essay to the project website.

Visualizing Democracy: Voting, Political Parties, and the Mapping Early American Elections Project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Visualizing Democracy: Voting, Political Parties, and the Mapping Early American Elections Project
Author: Greta Swain
Author: Jordan Bratt
Abstract: The purpose of this roundtable session is to acquaint the SHEAR audience with a newly launched website, MAPPING EARLY AMERICAN ELECTIONS (MEAE) (www.earlyamericanelecttions.org), a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and created by a team at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The project uses information from the New Nation Votes database, the most complete set of election returns available for the period before 1825. Unlike previously printed congressional atlases, the maps in this project depict election returns in a granular fashion--at the country level rather than at the district or state level. They are also interactive in nature. While the maps are based on the NNV data, the project team had to create what amounts to a new dataset in order to be able to map the election returns. This included associating the election data with the spatial data in the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries and United States Congressional District Shapefiles, creating links to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, and identifying party affiliations for many Congressional candidates. Changes in election laws and procedures in each state have also been taken into account, thus allowing for easier comparison of the results over time and across states.
Date: 07/19/2020
Primary URL: http://www.shear.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019SHEARConferenceProgramJuly16_2019.pdf
Primary URL Description: Conference program
Conference Name: Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Mapping Early American Elections Dataset (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Mapping Early American Elections Dataset
Author: Mapping Early American Elections project team
Abstract: Datasets for the Mapping Early American Elections project.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://earlyamericanelections.org/data/
Primary URL Description: Project website
Access Model: open access

Mapping Early American Elections Releases Essays, Maps, Tutorials, Data (Blog Post)
Title: Mapping Early American Elections Releases Essays, Maps, Tutorials, Data
Author: Lincoln Mullen
Abstract: Blog post announcing the final release of the project.
Date: 05/13/2019
Primary URL: https://rrchnm.org/news/mapping-early-american-elections-releases-essays-maps-tutorials-data/
Primary URL Description: Link to blog post
Blog Title: Mapping Early American Elections Releases Essays, Maps, Tutorials, Data
Website: RRCHNM

New Project Offers Exceptional Insight into Early American Elections (Article)
Title: New Project Offers Exceptional Insight into Early American Elections
Author: Anne Reynolds
Abstract: Media publicity about MEAE.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://chss.gmu.edu/articles/13416
Primary URL Description: Article website
Format: Other
Publisher: GMU

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