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Title: A Nation Under Our Feet

Subtitle: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

Author: Steven Hahn

Narrator: Noah Michael Levine

Format: Unabridged

Length: 19 hrs and 16 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-08-16

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 8 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice. 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. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration. Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework - looking out from slavery - to understand 20th-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.

Members Reviews:

The Shoulders on Which We Stand

Hahn did an extraordinary job collecting this information that gives us a glimpse into the transformation of the formerly enslaved (and silenced, in the case of free blacks) into self-actualization. Here's just one factoid to whet your appetite: in the last year of the Civil War, the Union Army was more than 10% people of color. The total number of people of color-- including some from other nations-- who fought: 209,145.

Engaging history of black politics before and after the Civil War

I suspect that Steven Hahn's "A Nation Under Our Feet" (ANOUF) was originally and primarily intended for a collegiate-level academic audience, perhaps in a history course studying slavery in the United States and its aftermath. However, it almost certainly received a much wider than intended audience when it won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in History. Indeed, that is the reason I read the book, as I try to read the Pulitzer Prize winning history book every year, to expand upon the very minimal grounding in history that one receives in today's U.S. educational system. So, the "non history major" perspective is the one from which I am reviewing this book.

Although ANOUF is pretty dense and does resemble a typical academic tome, with long paragraphs and voluminous footnotes, the compelling subject matter and Steven Hahn's prose elevate it far above the typical sleep-inducing history book that only finds a home on dusty college library shelves.