Steven Hahn (1)Kirja-arvosteluja

I might have gotten more out of this one had I spent more time with the physical book rather than the audio (in which the narrator pronounced "antebellum" as "ant-eye-bellum" for the first 11 chapters and used sometimes unsettling accents) and if I had made a timeline and running list of characters, but even without those, I think I have a much better sense of the rhetoric and forces that shaped the US during the 19th century and how remarkable and almost accidental the stability of the 20th century was.

Of particular note is how adept the powerful/wealthy are at intentionally fooling the population that their needs are one and the same. I also learned that corporate personhood began in the 19th c. with the active assistance of a SCOTUS that was hesitant (at best) about the personhood of actual persons who weren't white and male. I also learned how easy it is for a popular movement to get derailed by infighting and how cobbled together our financial system is. I was hoping for some greater insights into the current climate in the US, and I did get some of those but unfortunately no ideas for how to proceed wisely (just lots of lessons on what not to do).

A Nation Without Borders is the 3rd book in the Penguin History of the United States. There are five volumes in the series, which offer a comprehensive history of the United States from the colonial period to the 20th century. The series seeks to bring American History in a coherent and accessible form to the public.

I love history. But I cannot tackle a book with so much information in its pages like I would a story or a work of fiction. I worked my way through this book from cover to cover over time, learning a little bit and then doing further reading on the people, events and places mentioned in the chapters. For me, it was a bit like a self study college course. I like how the 80 years covered by this book are presented with a more global and diverse attitude, rather than the limited manner American history was taught to be in school. This book goes much more in depth about the contributions to American history of Mexico, native tribes, slaves, women...and incorporates that information into the history as a whole rather than skimming over it only as a means to an end.

The information is presented in a very readable way. While it is still possible to get bogged down in a 500-page comprehensive history of 8 decades, Steven Hahn did an excellent job of presenting the facts in a way that anyone can read and understand. It doesn't come off like a high-brow, stuffy scholarly regurgitation of facts, but an interesting overview of a very important time in the development of America.

Now that I've read my way through the 3rd volume in the Penguin series on American History, I'd love to read the other four books! It will take me awhile to work my way through all of the information, but it will be time well spent.

Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author of A Nation Under Our Feet.

**I won a copy of this book in a Goodreads Giveaway. While I appreciate the free book, the giveaway had no effect on the honesty of my review. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.**

I really don't think it's fair to argue that an author should have undertaken a different project than the one that he chose. But at the same time, I really feel that Hahn's arguments would have been a lot stronger if each of the three essays in this book had been a fully researched and documented book of its own. (Especially since the third essay does not seem to flow naturally from the first two.)

I think Hahn adds a lot to the historiography of slavery in the Americas: for example, the idea of writing about slavery as a national rather than local phenomenon and connecting slavery in the United States to slavery in Cuba and Haiti and so on. I think that's a very useful idea and a massive book could be written on that alone. I also liked the discussion about the fugitive slave communities in the North. I found the treatment of Marcus Garvey's ideas fascinating. But this book is 162 pages of text. There isn't enough room to fully discuss any of these topics.

I guess this is supposed to be a retelling of US history with a lot more emphasis on relations with native tribes, other Europeans on the continent, and Mexico, to give it that transAtlantic flavor. I ended up thinking that this pudding had no theme, which in fairness may be the American story. I did get a good reminder that American politicians, particularly in the South, have a long history of suppressing votes; white male voter turnout in many Southern counties in the 19th century was 30% or so despite the supposed enfranchisement of white men, and that was no accident.

Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration picks up where Eric Foner’s Reconstruction left off. Foner sought to counter the Dunning School that, in the early 1900s, condemned Radical Republicans, Northern carpetbaggers, Southern scalawags, and freedmen. Later, W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1935, and Howard Beale, in the 1940s, initiated the revisionist school, which cast Northern policymakers and freedmen in a more positive light. Foner’s work used the Dunning School’s research methods to argue that African-Americans were actors in Reconstruction and that racism played a pivotal role. Hahn shifts from the broad-strokes and top-down elements of Foner’s work to focus on the ways in which black Americans envisioned and created political identities beginning during the Civil War and ending in the early 1900s.
Land plays a pivotal role in Hahn’s argument. He writes, “Whatever their experiences in slavery, it became apparent during the war that freedpeople widely shared the desire to obtain land and use it as a basis for securely planting their families and kinship networks” (pg. 79). While many in the South believed that Northern agitators created the desire for land redistribution, Hahn writes, “Whatever many planters preferred to believe, rural freedpeople did not need tutors or outside agitators to nurture their desire for, or sense of entitlement to, the land” (pg. 135). Even without organized land redistribution, the threat of the idea offered a form of political power as freedpeople could hold “off from signing contracts until the new year,” thereby creating “a temporary labor shortage” that “weakened the landowners’ attempts to tie them down and dictate the terms” (pg. 156). In the end, these conflicts demonstrated the problems with Presidential Reconstruction.
Beyond the acquisition of land, Hahn focuses on the role of literacy. African Americans who escaped to Union lines during the Civil War took advantage of opportunities to learn. Hahn links this with the creation of political agency writing, “The wartime military, by its very nature, thus provided the sort of basic political educations that enslaved people had found almost impossible to come by” (pg. 97). Describing the role of printed matter in promoting colonization, Hahn writes, “We can see in this process the extension and vitality of a new popular culture of belief and verification tied more closely to the printed or written, rather than the spoken, word” (pg. 326).
Finally, Hahn argues that women gained more political agency in the wake of Reconstruction. Though women could not vote, they could help shape votes within their communities. Hahn writes, “Manipulating gender conventions and the expectations of courtship and sexual favor, they both shamed reluctant menfolk into performing their political duties and wreaked the most intimate and humiliating vengeance on those who strayed from the fold” (pg. 228). The shift in the focus of African American political life in the early 1900s toward the church, school, and home offered other opportunities, though men continued to dominate. As Hahn writes, “There was, in other words, not so much a stepping back of the men and a stepping forward of the women as a necessary redeployment to terrain in which both had recognized roles and authority, although the roles and authority still tilted power and leadership toward the men” (pg. 463).½

I really don't think it's fair to argue that an author should have undertaken a different project than the one that he chose. But at the same time, I really feel that Hahn's arguments would have been a lot stronger if each of the three essays in this book had been a fully researched and documented book of its own. (Especially since the third essay does not seem to flow naturally from the first two.)

I think Hahn adds a lot to the historiography of slavery in the Americas: for example, the idea of writing about slavery as a national rather than local phenomenon and connecting slavery in the United States to slavery in Cuba and Haiti and so on. I think that's a very useful idea and a massive book could be written on that alone. I also liked the discussion about the fugitive slave communities in the North. I found the treatment of Marcus Garvey's ideas fascinating. But this book is 162 pages of text. There isn't enough room to fully discuss any of these topics.

Subaltern perspectives

In this short essay-driven book, Steven Hahn attempts to debunk several myths about how the Civil War and African-American history is written about and remembered by the collective consciousness of the American public.

The books is divided into three sections. First, Hahn attempts to locate the institution of slavery within the national development of the United States but also in the broader context of European colonization in the western hemisphere. This contextualization helps to nuance our understanding of how slavery developed and adapted given the changing circumstances especially in comparison with the only slave revolution ever recorded in history in Saint Dominique.

The second section develops from the first, and boils down to Hahn's argument that the Civil War should be thought of as a slave rebellion with revolutionary undertones. Hahn argues that traditional historiography has largely suppressed the "agency" of slaves in order to mythologize the narrative to one of the Union North emancipating the slaves. Notwithstanding this obvious paternalism of whites in the North, African-Americans themselves tended to accept this version of history because they preferred to be portrayed as patriotic Americans who sought to live the ideals of American liberty -- rather than a vengeful pack of insurrectionists seeking to overthrow the system.

Finally, Hahn turns his attention to Garvyism -- the post-WWI political mass movement which capitalized on ideas of self-determination, anti-colonialism, and pan-Africanism. While much of Garvyism has focused on Marcus Garvey the man, Hahn instead chooses to focus on the followers of the movement, why they joined, what their motivations were, and how it came to influence much later movements like Black Power and the Panthers of the 70s. Again, Hahn attempts to show why much of the African-American experience has tended to emphasize the ideas and influence of W.E.B. Dubois and Martin Luther King, rather than Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X.

Ultimately, this short book is more about the writing of history and the politics of history more than the actual history itself. Still, Hahn forces us to challenge our own preconceptions of the history we are taught and the supposed facts. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is a student of history.