Philip J. Lampi (born 1944 in Fitchburg,

Worcester County, Massachusetts Worcester County ( ) is a County (United States), county in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. At the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 862,111, making it the second-most populous county in Massachusetts. Being 1,510.6 ...

) is a scholar and historian currently employed as a researcher at the

American Antiquarian Society The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), located in Worcester, Massachusetts, is both a learned society and a national research library of pre-twentieth-century American history and culture. Founded in 1812, it is the oldest historical society in ...

(AAS) in

Worcester, Massachusetts Worcester ( , ) is the List of municipalities in Massachusetts, second-most populous city in the U.S. state of Massachusetts and the list of United States cities by population, 113th most populous city in the United States. Named after Worcester ...

; he has spent much of his career reassembling records of early American election returns. "That effort has now led to

A New Nation Votes A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''English alphabet#Letter names, a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is sim ...

, a digital record of Lampi's work sponsored by the AAS,

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university in Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts, United States, with additional facilities in Boston and Grafton, as well as Talloires, France. Tufts also has several Doctor of Physical Therapy p ...

, and the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

. To the delight of graduate students, professional historians, and dabblers alike, the site makes public and searchable what, until now, could only be found in Lampi's loose-leaf notebooks: a comprehensive record of early American election returns from 1787 to 1825." ''Most of the early results in US elections were only published in local newspapers; there was no centralized US national record-keeping effort tallying the returns in US national elections. The only way to obtain the records was by physically travelling to the various state libraries and scouring their collections of locally-published early American newspapers; these papers were either archived originals or kept on microfilm; there was no way to make copies of the archives other than by photography (which required special permission) or by taking notes by hand. Making digital copies of the microfilm records was not possible at most US libraries until the late 1990s. So, " r decades, at times supporting himself by working as a night watchman, Lampi made lists of election returns on notepads. He drove all over the country, scouring the archives by day, sleeping in his car by night. He eventually transcribed the returns of some sixty thousand elections."

References

*https://web.archive.org/web/20120301131959/http://www.neh.gov:80/news/humanities/2008-01/TheOrphanScholar.html

External links

A New Nation Votes

Boston Globe article

Common-Place blog

New Yorker article
1944 births Living people 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers People from Fitchburg, Massachusetts Historians from Massachusetts American male non-fiction writers {{US-historian-stub