Southern A Nation Under Our Feet By Steven Hahn Summary

Steven Hahn is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nicholas Professor in American History at the University of Pennsylvania. His academic interests center on 19th century United States history, the history of slavery and emancipation, and the history of capitalism. He’s published work emphasizes the role of political organizations, labor organization, and the concept of freedom in the African American community. Hahn received his Ph.D. for Yale University in 1979. He published five books, The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of North America, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, A Nation Under our Feet, which received the Pulitzer Prize for history and the Bancroft Prize, The Roots of Southern

It builds off pervious works on theses networks like Philip D. Morgan’s A Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract” Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation, and Joel Williamson’s After Slavery: the Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction. Hahn also draws on extensive historical research into southern church records, the paper and records of the Union League and other African American organizations, and extensive archival research. However, his approach of incorporating personal narratives and extensive primary source quoting with his meticulous tracking of social and political development synthesizes the existing research into an easily accessible narrative bringing together economic, social, and political change into one

This approach brings in aspects of political science and economic theory into the work, which deepens the narrative. This is evident in the chapter on the rise of populism. He supports this approach with extensive archival research from many states, Virginia, Georgia, and Louisiana especially. He also examines church records, the notes and publications of the Union Leauge and other African American organization, and quotes these records extensively. This use of primary sources shows the depth of his scholarship and takes the book beyond another book on African American identity during Reconstruction to an essential work tracking the development of political agency through the words of those involved. Occasionally, the quoting does go into the realm of a case study (the chapter on Henry Adams an the idea of migration to Liberia) which breaks up an otherwise unified narrative, but even these aspects add depth and bring a new aspect of the complex history of political and social