Awards
2004 Pulitzer Prize for History
Synopses & Reviews
2004 Bancroft Prize2003 Merle Curti Award in American History This Pulitzer Prize winning book is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people an embryonic black nation. "Steven Hahn's A Nation under Our Feet is the most comprehensive account yet of black politics in the rural South before, during and after the Civil War. Whereas most previous work has focused either on the slave experience or on post-Emancipation struggles, Hahn's book encompasses both and shows the continuities between how blacks fought for self-determination in the two periods ...Based on prodigious research in primary sources, A Nation under Our Feet is one of the most important works in American social history to appear in recent years ...This book [is] a major achievement and a landmark in African-American history." George M. Frederickson, The Nation"Hahn argues, in this ambitious and fascinating book, that associations of slaves centered on kinship, work, and religion were far more intricate, enduring, and politicized than has been realized ...One of the most striking theses here is that black rural laborers, rather than urban, educated freeborn leaders, radicalized Reconstruction." New Yorker"[A] magisterial new book ...It is an awesome and audacious undertaking. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois' monumental Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 1880 (1935) has a historian ventured to structure a political history of the entire post emancipation South around black politics." Jane Daily, Chicago Tribune
Review
"Original and deeply informed, the book does an excellent job of rendering those devoted 'to the making of a new political nation while they made themselves into a new people.'" Publishers Weekly
Review
"[An] ambitious and fascinating book." The New Yorker
Review
"Readers interested in the history of the struggle for racial justice will appreciate this new perspective on the period that preceded the modern civil rights movement." Booklist
Synopsis
This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.
Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration.
Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework looking out from slavery to understand twentieth-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [481]-593) and index.
About the Author
Steven Hahn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History at <>University of Pennsylvania.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Looking Out from Slavery
Part I: "The Jacobins of the Country"
1. Of Chains and Threads
2. "The Choked Voice of a Race at Last Unloosed"
3. Of Rumors and Revelations
Part II: To Build a New Jerusalem
4. Reconstructing the Body Politic
5. "A Society Turned Bottomside Up"
6. Of Paramilitary Politics
Part III: The Unvanquished
7. The Education of Henry Adams
8. Of Ballots and Biracialism
9. The Valley and the Shadows
Epilogue: "Up, You Mighty Race"
Appendix: Black Leaders Data Set
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index