Steven Hahn

Historian

• Born: July 18, 1951
• Place of Birth: New York City, New York

Contribution: Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, best known for his books A Nation under Our Feet (2004), The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (2009), and A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016).

Background

Steven Hahn was born July 18, 1951, in New York City and has spent most of his life living on the East Coast. Though he seemed to have a knack for historical research as a young student, he did not consider becoming a historian until much later in his life. Initially, Hahn said that he wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. According to Hahn, one of the pivotal moments in his life was the summer of 1968, as he was nearing graduation from high school. The antiwar movement of that period resonated with Hahn, and he became passionate about politics in the United States.

Hahn attended the University of Rochester for his undergraduate education and began with a desire to study political science. According to Hahn, the political science department at the University of Rochester was heavily focused on rational choice theory, and he found that this approach to political theory did not resonate with him and his developing understanding of American politics. Hahn began taking history courses because of both his frustration with politics and his desire to learn from others who shared his left-of-center views. Studying with historians like Herbert Gutman, Stanley Engerman, and Robert Fogel helped to stimulate Hahn’s interest in the history of slavery in the United States. He graduated in 1973.

Hahn received his MA and his PhD (in 1979) from Yale University with a focus on nineteenth-century American history. Over the course of his career, Hahn’s research has covered African American history, the international history of the slave trade, and the history of the American South.

Career

Hahn’s first appointment to a university history faculty was at the University of Delaware. He went on to teach at the University of California, San Diego, and Northwestern University before he was named Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the course of his teaching career, Hahn has won three distinguished teaching awards, including the Richard S. Dunn Award at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Hahn is an elected Fellow of the Society of Historians.

Hahn’s 1983 book, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890, received the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. The book was hailed as a major step in the evolving understanding of southern history in the United States. It went into a second edition in 2006.

Hahn’s 2004 book A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration won the Pulitzer Prize in history and the Merle Curti Prize in Social History from the Organization of American Historians in 2007. A Nation under Our Feet also won the Bancroft Prize for best book in the category of American history. The book was one of the first historical accounts of slavery that focused on black political activism as a driving force in ending slavery in the United States.

Hahn was the Nathan I. Huggins lecturer at Harvard University, delivering a series of lectures about slavery and emancipation that were later collected in the book The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (2009). Hahn has stated that, despite common historical characterizations to the contrary, he views the United States Civil War as essentially a slave rebellion. Hahn argues that the history of slavery in the United States has been framed from a biased northeastern point of view that focuses on the work of white abolitionists and fails to recognize the fact that networks of runaway slaves drove the war toward abolition by taking the initiative and fleeing to the North, even if the North had not yet committed to freeing them.

In addition to writing books, Hahn has been an active contributor to magazines, newspapers, and essay collections. His articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Southern History, New Republic, Dissent, Le Monde diplomatique, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has also continued giving lectures and addresses at various institutions, across the United States as well as in Canada and Europe.

Hahn has also served as an expert witness on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Hahn also spent two years working with the Odyssey Program in Chicago, which offers college-level courses to economically disadvantaged individuals. Through his involvement with the American Council of Learned Societies and the California History Project, Hahn was involved in programs aimed at promoting history education in US public schools. He served as a consultant for historical film projects and museum projects in the mid-to-late 2010s.

In 2016 Hahn left the University of Pennsylvania to joined the history faculty at New York University, where he taught in the university's Prison Education Program. For the 2016–17 year he was the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in the Nineteenth Century at the Huntington Library in California. His next book was A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910, published in December 2016 as part of the Viking History of the United States series. It deals with imperialism, capitalism, and industrialization, particularly as they relate to how the southern US border was formed.

In 2024, Hahn published Illiberal America: A History. In this work, Hahn suggests that the harsh political and ideological divisions that seem to be unique to modern times have always been a part of the political landscape in the United States.

Impact

Hahn’s intensive research into Southern history and the history of slavery in the United States has helped to open up a debate about bias in historical analysis of the slave era. Hahn’s slave-centric and Southern-centric take on the Civil War and the slave struggle of the mid-nineteenth century has begun to influence a new generation of American historians.

Personal Life

Steven Hahn married fellow historian Stephanie McCurry, with whom he had two children, Declan and Saoirse. He lives in New York City.

Bibliography

Gimelstein, Shelli. “History Professor Election to Pulitzer Selection Board.” Daily Pennsylvanian, 2 Nov. 2011, www.thedp.com/article/2011/11/history‗professor‗and‗pulitzer‗prize‗winner‗selected‗to‗serve‗on‗pulitzer‗selection‗committee. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Kelly, Brian. “The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom.” American Nineteenth Century History 12.1 (2011): 119–21. Print.

Maddux, Blake. "Author Interview: Historian Steven Hahn on ‘Illiberal America’." The Arts Fuse, 28 Mar. 2024, artsfuse.org/289684/author-interview-historian-steven-hahn-on-illiberal-america/. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Mill, Megan. “Pulitzer Winning Historian Hahn Reveals Rebellion in American Civil War.” Daily Gazette. Swarthmore College, 24 Sept. 2004. Web. 27 June 2013.

Santoro, Gene. “Steven Hahn Sings the Slave Triumphant.” American History 44.2 (2009): 18–19. Print.

Smith, Sandy. “Steven Hahn.” Penn Current. U of Pennsylvania, 29 Apr. 2004. Web. 27 June 2013.