Eventhough the New York Times wouldn’t let us use their map technology, I still love their primaries map. http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/demmap/index.htmlIt’s great for finding out where we have been and where we are going in the 2008 Presidential election. For the map of the 1800 Presidential election you will have to check out the New reference book by Ken Martis. Hopefully your library has bought it already.  

It was a fine hard drive. It ran fast and hard. It was a warm hard drive and that may have been what did it in. But we may never know the cause of death. The hard drive was proclaimed dead at 3:15 yesterday March 31, 2008 at the apple store in Natick. At the Apple Store, the self-proclaimed,  Mac Genius” probably did not do everything that could be done. Krista strongly suspects that they were quick to pull the plug in order to harvest the hard drive to be resold as a used part. Krista stated, “They only spent 5 minutes trying to cure it! It seemed like they just wanted to make the job easier for them.”

 The hard drive will be replaced but it may never be the same despite being charged 50$ to backup data.  Krista thanks everyone for their support during this hard time and will except donations in the form of assistance in potentially reconfiguring programs lost.  Until a new replacement hard drive is installed, Krista can be found working off of other work stations.

One of the great pleasures of working on the A New Nation Votes project is the amount of interesting material in the pages that don’t have to do with the elections.

Here’s a great quote from the Delaware Governor’s Register from 1821:

“September 17 - Thomas Fisher Esquire Sheriff of Kent County deposited in the office of the Secretary of State the certificate of Nicholas Ridgely Esquire Chancellor, certifying that the said Thomas Fisher Esquire Sheriff as aforesaid had on the said 17 September 1821 - given security within the time and in the manner required by an Act of the General Assembly entitled “A Supplement to the Act entitled “An Act to requiring “Sheriffs to give security” passed at Dover January 1821 - with the recognizance taken for that purpose.”

I have not misquoted any of that. There is an Act that’s a Supplement for an Act entitled an Act. There are two open quotes that are left open.

Roughly translated into common sense, Fisher gave Ridgely a check.

Erik Beck

Salem Town was first elected a Massachusetts State Senator from Worcester County in 1796. He ran in 1795 but lost. He was a champion of the First Massachusetts Turnpike, according to the book, The Turnpikes of New England published in 1919 that I found, for free, in full, on Google Books. Hurrah for freely available information!

It seems that Boston’s most recent ‘Big Dig’ efforts to bury the expressway sits as only the most recent example of contractors ‘cutting corners’ in Massachusetts road building. One observer of the First Massachusetts Turnpike, “thought that the contractor received too much profit from that. He cautioned his friend to watch the contractors, as they would cheat, placing stumps and large stones in the fill instead of good road material.” (Turnpikes, page 65) Sound familiar. Advice that should have been heard 200 years later.

Anyway, our man, Salem Town, continued to champion Turnpikes and the Turnpike book gives a short bio on pages 87-88

• Of Salem Town we had already heard as an incorporator of the First Masschusetts [Turnpike]. He was a man of note, and at this time [1802] was serving in the senate for the second time after having declined an advancement to the council. He had been a quartermaster for the revolutionary army … and later was second major in the Massachusetts militia. He served seven years in the house and eight in the senate, being first elected to the latter body as a successor to Moses Gill, who was advanced to a Lieutenant Governor in 1794. In 1802 and 1803, he served as a member of the Governor’s Council. Besides his connection with the First Massachusetts and with the Norfolk and Bristol he later appeared either as an incorporator or on the committee for laying out, of several other turnpike corporations.
• http://books.google.com/books?id=tjsBAAAAYAAJ&printsec=titlepage#PPA87,M1