Steven Hahn
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Steven Hahn is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History at University of Pennsylvania.
Educated at the University of Rochester, where he worked with Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman, Hahn received his Ph.D. from Yale University. His dissertation was overseen by C. Vann Woodward, and later Howard Lamar.
He has written on the South, slavery and emancipation, the Populist Era, rural cultures, and social migration. His first book was The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (Oxford University Press, 1983). Winner of the 1984 Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians, this study was important because it provided a detailed and original account of the political ideology of white southern small farmers. At the time this group, the majority of the American South, had received relatively little scholarly attention. Hahn presented the southern yeomen as non-capitalist in crucial respects, and how they were undermined by the increasing commercialization of Southern agriculture after the Civil War. Hahn coedited, with Jonathan Prude of Emory University, "The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America" (University of North Carolina Press, 1985). He also worked extensively with the University of Maryland's project documenting the history of emancipation and co-edited (with Steven Miller, Susan O'Donovan, John Rodrigue, and Leslie Rowland) Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Series III: Land and Labor in 1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Hahn's 2003 work on Black political struggles from 1865 to 1920, A Nation Under our Feet won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, and the Merle Curti Prize in Social History from the Organization of American Historians. Several historians have noted that the prospects for interracial struggle are much less in this book than in his first volume: the Populists had almost no interest in a genuinely biracial polity. Hahn has won a number of teaching awards and has been supported in his research by the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
