I recently completed a 45-page paper for my first semester as a History PhD student. In this paper, I looked at how abolitionists addressed the issue of residential segregation and what the long term impact of their efforts were in this area after the abolitionists themselves were dead. As part of my analysis, I examined a 1966 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on whether to remove a fair housing policy from a proposed civil rights bill. I determined that there was a strong correlation between how much of an abolitionist tradition states had in the 1800s and how states’/regions’ Representatives voted on fair housing in the 1960s. For this blog post, I decided to summarize my findings on this and look at two similar correlations related to gay marriage: is there a correlation between how early a state legalized interracial marriage and whether its Senators and Representatives voted…