Steven Hahn
Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History
Steven Hahn received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is a specialist on the social and political history of nineteenth-century America, on the history of the American South, and on the comparative history of slavery and emancipation. He is the author of The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (Oxford University Press, 1983), which received both the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians, as well as of articles that have appeared in Past and Present, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of Southern History. He is also the coeditor (with Jonathan Prude) of The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (University of North Carolina Press, 1985); and (with Steven Miller, Susan O'Donovan, John Rodrigue, and Leslie Rowland) of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Series III: Land and Labor in 1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2004). His latest book, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003), won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the Merle Curti Prize in Social History of the Organization of American Historians.
Hahn has been on the faculties of the University of Delaware, the University of California, San Diego, and Northwestern University before coming to Penn, and he has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in American and comparative history, winning two Distinguished Teaching Awards. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and he is an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians.
Hahn has been actively involved with projects that promote the teaching of history in the public schools and that make humanities education available to diverse members of the community. He is currently at work on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures in African-American History to be delivered at Harvard University in 2007, and on a history of the United States from 1840 to 1900 to be published in the Penguin History of the United States.
Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)
For current course listings, consult the Course Directory.
- HIST 020 History of the United States to 1865
- HIST 165 American Identity
- HIST 171 American South, 1861 to Present
- HIST 204 Roots of American Empire
- HIST 204 Politics of Slaves and Freedpeople
- HIST 204 Comparative Perspectives on Slavery, Emancipation, & Race
- HIST 353 Slavery, Race & Revolution in the Atlantic World
- HIST 610 Topics in Southern History
