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The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures
The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom
Pulitzer Prize–winner Steven Hahn’s provocative new book challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from slave emancipations of the eighteenth century through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the twentieth century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms.
Historians have offered important new perspectives and evidence concerning the geographical expanse of slavery in the United States and the protracted process of abolishing it. They have also uncovered a wealth of new material on the political currents running through black communities from enslavement to the present day. Yet their scholarship has failed to dislodge familiar interpretive frameworks that may no longer make much sense of the past.
Based on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom asks why this may be so and offers sweeping reassessments. It defines new chronological and spatial boundaries for American and African-American politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. It suggests, with historical comparisons, that we may have missed a massive slave rebellion during the Civil War. And it takes a serious look at the development and appeal of Garveyism and the hidden history of black politics it may help to reveal. Throughout, it presents African Americans as central actors in the arenas of American politics, while emphasizing traditions of self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense among them.
Historians have offered important new perspectives and evidence concerning the geographical expanse of slavery in the United States and the protracted process of abolishing it. They have also uncovered a wealth of new material on the political currents running through black communities from enslavement to the present day. Yet their scholarship has failed to dislodge familiar interpretive frameworks that may no longer make much sense of the past.
Based on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom asks why this may be so and offers sweeping reassessments. It defines new chronological and spatial boundaries for American and African-American politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. It suggests, with historical comparisons, that we may have missed a massive slave rebellion during the Civil War. And it takes a serious look at the development and appeal of Garveyism and the hidden history of black politics it may help to reveal. Throughout, it presents African Americans as central actors in the arenas of American politics, while emphasizing traditions of self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense among them.
- GenresHistory
272 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2009
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113 people want to read
About the author
Steven Hahn
21 books67 followersSteven Hahn is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 25, 2025
Empowerment In African American History
Steven Hahn's new book, "The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom" (2009) is based upon the Nathan L. Huggins Lectures Hahn delivered at Harvard University. The Huggins lectures are designed to explore important themes in African American history. Hahn is Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. His best-known work, "A Nation under our Feet" (2004) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Merle Curti Prize in Social History. The book tells how rural southern African Americans took steps towards their own political empowerment beginning with the period of slavery and continuing through the Great Migration northward beginning early in the Twentieth Century.
Hahn's new book continues the theme of "A Nation under our Feet" by examining how African American history illustrates the ideals and goals of "self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense". (Preface, xvi) Hahn wants to show how African Americans took control of their own destinies and tried aggressively to define their own characters beginning in the days of slavery. Hahn wants to counter what he perceives as received accounts that African Americans tended to respond reactively to slavery and segregation. He also emphasizes the separateness of African American political activity as African Americans attempted to find their own way and not simply seek equal rights in the larger society. Hahn's approach sympathizes with modern forms of African American political activity such as Black Power and the Black Panthers. It is somewhat critical of more mainstream approaches which emphasized the integration of African Americans as citizens with full rights and equality in American life. This approach sees African Americans as shared partners in the American dream rather than, perhaps, as having a separate dream. The approach Hahn questions is, I think, exemplified by the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, especially in his "I have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963. A recent book on King's speech, "King's Dream" by Eric Sundquist emphasizes the manner in which King's dream was part of a shared American vision. While not entirely disagreeing with this account, Hahn tries to supplement and qualify it.
The book consists of three dense and detailed lectures on empowerment in African American history. They are written in a scholarly yet provocative manner as Hahn tries to challenge received accounts and tries to explain why other accounts have had difficulty receiving a hearing. At times in the lectures, especially when he examines African American activity during the Civil War, Hahn seems to suggest that the evidence will support various competing accounts. At other times, he seems to me unduly dogmatic and insistent upon his own reading of events.
The first lecture, "Slaves at Large": the Emancipation Process and the Terrain of African American Politics" is the most difficult and challenging of the three. Hahn attacks the view that there were two emancipations in American history: the emancipation of slaves in the North which was completed in the early part of the nineteenth century and the emancipation in the South which pitted the sections of the United States against each other in the Civil War. Hahn sees emancipation as a single continuous political process which effected the United States in its entirety. He compares free blacks in the North to maroons (communities of escaped slaves), who worked with and shared the fate of enslaved blacks in the South; and he argues that blacks in the North remained almost as much in need of emancipation as did those blacks still subjected to slavery. For Hahn, emancipation was an international political movement which began in the 18th Century (where historians tend not to look for it) and which still continues.
The second essay, "Did we Miss the Greatest Slave Rebellion in African American History" argues that African American activity, in escaping from slavery and fighting in the Union Army, among other things, constituted a still-unacknowledged slave rebellion. Hahn draws parallels between the activities of African Americans during the Civil War, and the rebellion in Haiti led by Toussaint L'Overture in the late 18th and early 19th Century. Hahn tries to examine why Americans have, from the Civil War onward, avoided characterizing African American activity during the war as a rebellion against slavery. Hahn argues that African Americans were seen as dependent and passive and that the image of rebellion contradicts this. But Hahn seems himself to step back from a full characterization of the Civil War as a slave rebellion. He admits that the evidence may be viewed as equivocal and could be interpreted in other ways.
The final essay deals with "Marcus Garvey, the UNIA and the Hidden Political History of African Americans." Garvey (1887 - 1940) was a Jamaican who attained a large African American following in the United States in the early 1920s. Garvey was a separatist who advocated a separate country for at least some African Americans in Africa. In some respects, Garvey's programme was similar to that of the American Colonization Society. W.E.B. DuBois denounced Garvey, and Garvey was ultimately deported from the United States. Hahn examines Garvey's movement, which remains alive in the United States today, and its followers. He tries to rehabilitate and defend Garvey's movement by finding in it a source of African American strength, distinctiveness and empowerment that had and continues to have an important impact on how many African Americans see themselves.
Hahn has written a challenging book that will encourage its readers to examine their assumptions about both the African American experience and the American experience.
Robin Friedman
Steven Hahn's new book, "The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom" (2009) is based upon the Nathan L. Huggins Lectures Hahn delivered at Harvard University. The Huggins lectures are designed to explore important themes in African American history. Hahn is Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. His best-known work, "A Nation under our Feet" (2004) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Merle Curti Prize in Social History. The book tells how rural southern African Americans took steps towards their own political empowerment beginning with the period of slavery and continuing through the Great Migration northward beginning early in the Twentieth Century.
Hahn's new book continues the theme of "A Nation under our Feet" by examining how African American history illustrates the ideals and goals of "self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense". (Preface, xvi) Hahn wants to show how African Americans took control of their own destinies and tried aggressively to define their own characters beginning in the days of slavery. Hahn wants to counter what he perceives as received accounts that African Americans tended to respond reactively to slavery and segregation. He also emphasizes the separateness of African American political activity as African Americans attempted to find their own way and not simply seek equal rights in the larger society. Hahn's approach sympathizes with modern forms of African American political activity such as Black Power and the Black Panthers. It is somewhat critical of more mainstream approaches which emphasized the integration of African Americans as citizens with full rights and equality in American life. This approach sees African Americans as shared partners in the American dream rather than, perhaps, as having a separate dream. The approach Hahn questions is, I think, exemplified by the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, especially in his "I have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963. A recent book on King's speech, "King's Dream" by Eric Sundquist emphasizes the manner in which King's dream was part of a shared American vision. While not entirely disagreeing with this account, Hahn tries to supplement and qualify it.
The book consists of three dense and detailed lectures on empowerment in African American history. They are written in a scholarly yet provocative manner as Hahn tries to challenge received accounts and tries to explain why other accounts have had difficulty receiving a hearing. At times in the lectures, especially when he examines African American activity during the Civil War, Hahn seems to suggest that the evidence will support various competing accounts. At other times, he seems to me unduly dogmatic and insistent upon his own reading of events.
The first lecture, "Slaves at Large": the Emancipation Process and the Terrain of African American Politics" is the most difficult and challenging of the three. Hahn attacks the view that there were two emancipations in American history: the emancipation of slaves in the North which was completed in the early part of the nineteenth century and the emancipation in the South which pitted the sections of the United States against each other in the Civil War. Hahn sees emancipation as a single continuous political process which effected the United States in its entirety. He compares free blacks in the North to maroons (communities of escaped slaves), who worked with and shared the fate of enslaved blacks in the South; and he argues that blacks in the North remained almost as much in need of emancipation as did those blacks still subjected to slavery. For Hahn, emancipation was an international political movement which began in the 18th Century (where historians tend not to look for it) and which still continues.
The second essay, "Did we Miss the Greatest Slave Rebellion in African American History" argues that African American activity, in escaping from slavery and fighting in the Union Army, among other things, constituted a still-unacknowledged slave rebellion. Hahn draws parallels between the activities of African Americans during the Civil War, and the rebellion in Haiti led by Toussaint L'Overture in the late 18th and early 19th Century. Hahn tries to examine why Americans have, from the Civil War onward, avoided characterizing African American activity during the war as a rebellion against slavery. Hahn argues that African Americans were seen as dependent and passive and that the image of rebellion contradicts this. But Hahn seems himself to step back from a full characterization of the Civil War as a slave rebellion. He admits that the evidence may be viewed as equivocal and could be interpreted in other ways.
The final essay deals with "Marcus Garvey, the UNIA and the Hidden Political History of African Americans." Garvey (1887 - 1940) was a Jamaican who attained a large African American following in the United States in the early 1920s. Garvey was a separatist who advocated a separate country for at least some African Americans in Africa. In some respects, Garvey's programme was similar to that of the American Colonization Society. W.E.B. DuBois denounced Garvey, and Garvey was ultimately deported from the United States. Hahn examines Garvey's movement, which remains alive in the United States today, and its followers. He tries to rehabilitate and defend Garvey's movement by finding in it a source of African American strength, distinctiveness and empowerment that had and continues to have an important impact on how many African Americans see themselves.
Hahn has written a challenging book that will encourage its readers to examine their assumptions about both the African American experience and the American experience.
Robin Friedman
July 13, 2009
Couple of months ago I realized I know nothing about slavery in the South except the basic facts of it, the things we all learn from history taught in schools, along with the popular and unreliable presentations such as Gone with the Wind. I wanted to find books which would not only discuss every dimension of Southern slavery but would also define my perspective. Hahn's book is the first I've finished. While it wasn't quite the general overview I was after, it still offered new things to see and different slants by which to see them. For instance, he writes of how, in response to the war generally and to the invasion of the South by the Union armies, slaves left their plantations to flee to areas occupied by them, encouraging Lincoln toward emancipation sooner than he'd intended. This and their willingness to fight for the Union in large numbers was a significant ingredient in the outcome of the war. And, says Hahn, as a result of this mass migration and rush to security toward Union lines and into their service, it could and should be considered by historians as the largest and most significant slave rebellion in history. Hahn also writes about Marcus Garvey, a man I'd never heard of until a few months ago. The appeal of his emigrationistic and nationalistic ideas and his Universal Negro Improvement Association were very influential and was the inspiration for the NAACP, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, and black power in general. So, a perspective-forming book. And very well written. Based on lectures at Harvard, he fleshed it all out in sentences so beautifully composed that he's my current here.
July 4, 2011
This book deserves more attention than it has attracted, I believe. Hahn's scholarship is so impressive. Africans slaves in America within their own communities from the early beginnings worked to expand their liberties quite unknown to and outside any support that gradually grew in the European American population. Despite advocacy for abolition that began to appear prominently in the first half of the 19th century in the North, racism was the predominant view North and South before the Civil War. Only the degree differed, by and large. Under the Fugitive Slave laws, no free African-American or escaped slave was truly safe anywhere in the United States, and the return of captured slaves or even the illegal capture and re-enslaving of freed blacks made prominent news before the war. The truth seems to be that the whole United States was a slave republic prior to the war.
The implication that the Civil War was less about a dispute across sharp geographic boundaries and more about the next phase in the process of the broadening of the American definition of "we" may be controversial. Or it may become a kind of expanded definition that can now include not only the reconciliation of the white North and white South after the war but also over time the African-American community within that larger meaning of "American." The Civil War then becomes just one more step in a process that long preceded it and continues to this day, and is not a singular cataclysmic transformation of the United States. It is also less a division between North and South than we have been educated to believe.
Along the spectrum of political development in the African-American community is Hahn's fascinating description of Marcus Garvey, usually an object of ridicule. Within the community itself, the disparate views of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B DuBois, and Marcus Garvey reflect the difficulty among the African-American population to decide what to accommodate, what to resist and what to abandon. A great read.
The implication that the Civil War was less about a dispute across sharp geographic boundaries and more about the next phase in the process of the broadening of the American definition of "we" may be controversial. Or it may become a kind of expanded definition that can now include not only the reconciliation of the white North and white South after the war but also over time the African-American community within that larger meaning of "American." The Civil War then becomes just one more step in a process that long preceded it and continues to this day, and is not a singular cataclysmic transformation of the United States. It is also less a division between North and South than we have been educated to believe.
Along the spectrum of political development in the African-American community is Hahn's fascinating description of Marcus Garvey, usually an object of ridicule. Within the community itself, the disparate views of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B DuBois, and Marcus Garvey reflect the difficulty among the African-American population to decide what to accommodate, what to resist and what to abandon. A great read.
July 14, 2009
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 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.
October 22, 2016
I think the people who disliked this book really wanted something more like Hahn's other work, A Nation Under Our Feet. Personally, I enjoyed this book much more because it provided new frameworks through which to consider the Civil War and the long history of Reconstruction. I don't feel like this book is supposed to serve as a history per se, but rather a call to arms to rethink American history and a review of historiography.
December 17, 2010
The highlight of this book is the chapter on Marcus Garvey, a figure who has been derided and lampooned but whose influence has remained pertinent in discussions to the present day.
June 13, 2014
It was solid and kept my interest. These are theories that are new to me, and I find very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews