First Vote presents two case studies of the intersection of race and politics at an inflection point in American history: the arrival of African American voting following the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution. The discovery of official polls books that preserve the votes of newly enfranchised African Americans and their white neighbors in two Kentucky counties—Garrard and Todd—enable us to follow black and white voters across multiple elections during the Reconstruction era. It reveals the political effects of network and neighborhood and shows where and how individual African Americans voted. It is a story of both political courage and cross-racial alliances, in which black men and white men in joined forces to create a new political majority in one case and, in the other case study, failed to do so.

The First Vote project is funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities (Collaborative Research Division), with support from the Australian Research Council, Virginia Humanities, the University of Virginia, and Flinders University.

Read about the contributors to the project.