I'm doing research on voting patterns from 1800-1815 in Massachusetts. Just recently I found some data which broke down home valuations from 1798 into different categories. Now its a matter of developing a formula of some sort so that I can compare towns against one another and see if there is any correlation between the towns wealth and how they voted.

I just started reading Richard Gid Powers's Not Without Honor: the History of American Anticommunism, and right off the bat I'm unreasonably disappointed at the lack of an introduction. I mean, the two page prologue about Ronald Reagan certainly illuminates his own perspective plenty, but given that most of his secondary sources so far are from the 50s and 60s, a little discussion of historiography wouldn't have gone amiss.

I'm looking for a book for some personal study. “Instructions for Training a Ships Crew in the use of Arms in Attack and Defense” Lt. William Pringle Green, 1812

Does anyone hear have or know or can point me in the right direction. I've sent an email of to Royal Museums Greenwich library as they have a page on there site for it, but currently nothing is there.

I am reading Jon Meacham's "Thomas Jefferson The Art of Power" at the moment. I'm not super far in as I haven't had the time to read I would like, but the book is really interesting. I did not know how awesome Thomas's father Peter Jefferson was or that at the age of ten Thomas Jefferson was sent into the woods alone with a gun to prove he could survive in the wild, or the Jefferson disliked confrontation and would often do whatever he could to avoid it.

A book I'm re-reading at the moment for research purposes (I need to recall exactly how he describes the early political economists as utopian) is Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. There are a handful of pieces of scholarship that I return to again and again, and learn something new each time; this is absolutely one of them.