Description: 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.
Brief description: Steven Hahn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History at University of Pennsylvania.
Review Quotes: 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" (12/29/2003 12:00:00 AM)