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Dedication and 27 Years of Research Result In New Reference Series
From the newswire, In 1975 University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson, then a member of U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy’s staff, began a research project on the importance of committee assignments to the careers of legislative leaders. His inquiries took him to the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress, where he learned that no history of legislative committee assignments in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives existed. When Nelson wondered aloud if such a compilation might be created, he got a straightforward answer. “The consensus was, no, this couldn’t be done,” Nelson says. “The information was buried in obscure resolutions deep in the archives. It would be virtually impossible, people said, to put together a membership history of each committee.” Twenty-seven years and countless research hours later, Nelson, along with co-authors David T. Canon of the University of Wisconsin and Charles Stewart III of MIT, have proven the experts wrong with the publication of “Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1789-1946,” a weighty four-volume set that contains over 100,000 committee assignments and more than three million separate pieces of information. The four new volumes join a two-volume set Nelson published in 1993, “Committees of the U.S. Congress, 1947-1992.” All six volumes are published by Congressional Quarterly Press.

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