Description: Pulitzer Prize-winner Hahn challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from 18th-century slave emancipations through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the 20th century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms.
Brief description: Steven Hahn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History at University of Pennsylvania.
Review Quotes: Hahn has emerged as the pre-eminent historian of black politics in the apparently lost decades between the end of the Civil War and the stirrings of the modern civil rights movement... In The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, Hahn explains that the decades after Reconstruction were far from a political vacuum for Southern blacks. Instead, black people worked to wring as much as they could from the promises of the Reconstruction years, then regrouped after the Confederate counterrevolution in 1877 and continued to organize... At the heart of Hahn's critique is an attempt to recover African-Americans as political actors: to insist that, under slavery and 'freedom, ' in the North and South, black politics was everywhere. This politics has been obscured in popular history, and even in academic circles, because it sits so poorly with two cherished myths about American history: that a commitment to freedom was a strand in the nation's political DNA, and that black people have patiently pursued integration since 1776. Hahn wants us to be bolder in exploring the hidden corners of black history, to set aside the integrationist narrative in search of the totality of black experience.--Nicholas Guyatt "The Nation" (6/14/2010 12:00:00 AM)