| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 406 words from this article are provided below; about 764 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Steven Hahn. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 610. $35.00.
This volume has already won the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. The honors are richly deserved, for Steven Hahn has produced a magnificent study of African Americans in the southern United States during the years from the 1850s to the early twentieth century. The product of exhaustive research, it is a book that summarizes our current understanding of the field and puts forth bold new interpretations that will generate debate for years to come.	1
One of the book's many virtues is its expansive scope. Beginning with the late antebellum era, Hahn provides a largely chronological account of African Americans' struggle for freedom and independence under slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the New South, while paying careful attention to geographical variations. The story that he tells is in some ways well known, but in tracing it he combines richness of detail with sweeping narrative and interpretive sophistication to produce a work of unusual interest and importance. Indeed, in its epic quality, this book stands alongside two other masterpieces of Reconstruction history, W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935) and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Two interrelated themes underlie Hahn's approach and provide interpretive unity to his account. The first is his broad understanding of politics as something that encompasses not just elections and formal government but "collective struggles for what might be termed socially meaningful power" (p. 3). The second is his emphasis on black agency, the extent to which "African Americans continually made and remade their politics and political history in complex relation to shifting events" (p. 7). These two themes are not without risks; defining almost everything as political can reduce the term's significance, and focusing too exclusively on black agency can obscure the extent to which African Americans were objects of brutal repression and were not able to remake their world as they wished. For the most part, however, Hahn skillfully skirts these risks to produce a compelling story of a never-ending struggle for human dignity. At the heart of this struggle was the desire to avoid being pushed around, to achieve a modicum of autonomy, independence, or what Hahn calls "self-governance" (p. 5).	. . .

There are about 764 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.