Just Ahead of Election Season, University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab Unveils New Map Focusing on the Role of Congress

Electing the House of Representatives, a collaborative project mapping nearly two centuries of elections, was released online today by the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab and Virginia Tech’s Department of History. This map is the most comprehensive map of House election results.

Electing the House provides an opportunity for citizens and scholars to explore patterns in America’s democratic landscape across time.

“Today the strengths of the major parties divides between urban and rural areas, as well as between the coasts and interior of the country,” says Robert K. Nelson, director of the DSL. “That’s not new. Electing the House encourages an appreciation and deeper understanding of the changing but always significant geographic dimension of American partisanship.”

“Besides exploring the elections across space, Electing the House helps users to see and appreciate how the strength of the parties has changed across time in the places they live,” added LaDale Winling, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, who worked with Nelson and his team on this project.

These open access maps are part of the larger American Panorama project, a historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. American Panorama maps have been featured by The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Geographic, Slate, and more.

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This mapping project was created through the collaboration of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond and the Department of History at Virginia Tech. The College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, the Department of History at Virginia Tech, and the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies helped fund this project with grants for research and data work. The American Panorama project is also funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.