A Nation Under Our Feet

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.

ISBN 067401765X   Pages 624 ISBN13 9780674017658 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Harvard University Press   Weight (grammes) 776 Imprint The Belknap Press   Published in Cambridge, Mass. Format Paperback   Previous ISBN 9780674011694 Publication date 06 May 2005   Height (mm) 235 Library of Congress 2003045326   Width (mm) 155 DEWEY 976   Spine width (mm) 28 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

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

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 20030922 Hahn examines how disenfranchised African Americans in the rural South exercised grassroots strategies to gain political power--albeit limited--after emancipation until the migration to the North. Hahn asserts that southern rural blacks were much more active and assertive in gaining political rights than is typically portrayed and explores the connection between labor and political rights...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. -- Vanessa Bush Booklist 20031015 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 20031229 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 20040202 In this magisterial new book, University of Pennsylvania historian Steven Hahn gives us the history of the South from the eve of the Civil War through the dawn of the Great Migration from the perspective of rural blacks. It is an awesome and audacious undertaking. Not since W. E. B. DuBois' 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 Dailey Chicago Tribune 20040222 The broad scope of this study and Hahn's ability to articulate the complex characteristics of African American political origins and growth supersedes Eric Foner's seminal work or any other more specialized study on the era. -- B. A. Wineman Choice 20040401 Steven Hahn's meticulously researched, richly detailed history of the black political tradition is a book of the first importance, for the author demonstrates how recently freed slaves drew on their experiences under the peculiar institution to create political communities. He explains how they responded to black nationalism, formed alliances across geographical and cultural divisions, and eventually gained rights previously denied them. This outstanding book should win more than one prize. -- Lee Milazzo Dallas Morning News 20040220 Hahn's book demonstrates that from slavery to the Great Migration of the last century, African Americans were astute politicians, using alliances with the good and bad to ensure socioeconomic and political success. But first and foremost the author reveals for his readers how blacks dealt with the dynamics of change in the post-Civil War South as it impacted their daily lives. -- A. J. Williams-Myers MultiCultural Review 20040501 Drawing synthetically but fruitfully on a vast scholarship on slavery, emancipation, and the New South, it will likely become required reading, if not for the general public, then at least for students of American history. Those readers will encounter an elegantly written, deeply moving, powerful statement of black humanity and black agency in the momentous struggles to end slavery and to define freedom. -- Eric A

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