Red and Blue Maps Before Red and Blue Maps

Before red and blue became shorthand for conservative and liberal, before the 2000 elections and all that, Ken Martis undertook the mammoth task of nailing down every last Congressional district going all the way back to the first Congress, producing two historical almanacs identifying every district and every member of Congress along with their party identifications. The result was two great flip books of the early history of American politics and a probing history of political parties in America. I wrote as much of the story as I could squeeze into the pages of Humanities.