Mapping Early American Elections

This repository contains the data from the Mapping Early American Elections project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. This project, which is funded by the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment for the Humanities, is based on the data from the New Nation Votes project.

Tutorials

For more information about how to use this dataset, please see our tutorials:

• Tutorial for R
• Tutorial for QGIS

Relationship to datasets

This dataset has been prepared for use with several spatial datasets. Please see the citations for and links to those datasets on our website's data page. These are the datasets:

• John H. Long and Peggy Tuck Sinko, Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture, Newberry Library (2010).
• Jeffrey B. Lewis, Brandon DeVine, Lincoln Pitcher, and Kenneth C. Martis, Digital Boundary Definitions of United States Congressional Districts, 1789--2012, University of California, Los Angels (2013).
• Erik Steiner, United States Historical City Populations, 1790--2010, Spatial History Project, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University (2015).

This repository also contains information and IDs from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

Repository structure

Most of the CSV files in this dataset are intended to work together like the tables in a relational database. But many of the files are also intended for your convenience in mapping. Below is a description of the most significant files and directories.

CSV files:

• candidates.csv. All of the candidates in the NNV dataset, with additional information from the Congressional Biographical Directory where available.
• congbio_elected.csv. A list of who was elected in Congressional elections, according to the Congresional Biographical Directory.
• congressional-candidate-totals.csv. The total votes for each candidate in Congressional elections.
• congressional-counties-parties.csv. The total votes for each party by county in a Congressional election. This data can be mapped by county using the AHCB county shapefiles.
• congressional-counties.csv. The votes for each candidate by county in a Congressional election. This data can be mapped by county using the AHCB county shapefiles.
• congressional-elections-dates.csv. The best approximation of which date to use for each of the state Congressional elections.
• elections.csv. The elections (i.e., ballots) listed in the NNV dataset that pertain to Congressional elections.
• maps-to-elections.csv. Each ID from the Mapping Elections project gathers together the ballots from NNV into a map of all Congressional elections happening in that state.
• maps.csv. Contains an ID for each map created by the Mapping Elections project, which can be used with maps-to-elections.csv to gather the election returns from NNV.
• staterepresentative-candidate-totals.csv. The total votes for each candidate in selected elections for state representatives.
• staterepresentative-counties-parties.csv. The total votes for each party by county in a selected elections for state representatives. This data can be mapped by county using the AHCB county shapefiles.

Directories:

• congressional-parties-by-state/. This directory contains the data in congressional-counties-parties.csv, but split apart into one file per state and Congress identified by MEAE ID. This format may be more convenient for mapping in GIS and other software.
• congressional-candidate-counties-by-state/. This directory contains the data in congressional-counties.csv, but split apart into one file per state and Congress identified by MEAE ID. This format may be more convenient for mapping in GIS and other software.
• congressional-candidate-totals-by-state/. This directory contains the data in congressional-candidate-totals.csv, but split apart into one file per state and Congress identified by MEAE ID. This format may be more convenient for mapping in GIS and other software.
• towns/. This directory contains latitutes and longitudes from the states that reported significant numbers of election returns by town in the NNV dataset.

License

The data in this repository from Mapping Early American Elections is made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License, ODC-BY 1.0. The data is derived and modified from the NNV data, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) dedication.