About the Book
Forging America speaks to both the complexities of historical experience and the meanings of the past for our present-day lives. Warning against the assumption of preordained outcomes, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steve Hahn focuses the reader's attention on those moments when historical change occurs. He weaves a history that is continental and transnational, a history of the many peoples whose experiences and aspirations--often times involving
struggle and conflict--went into the forging of a nation.
Table of Contents:
Maps, Tables, and Figures
Features
Sources for Forging America
Preface
About the Author
15. Ending the Rebellion and Re(constructing) the Nation 1863-1865
Part Four: Industrial Society and Its Discontents
16. THE PROMISE AND LIMITS OF RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1877
17. CAPITALISM AND THE GILDED AGE, 1873-1890
18. CAULDRONS OF PROTEST, 1873-1896
19. CONSTRUCTING PROGRESSIVISM, 1886-1914
20. EMPIRE AND RACE, 1890-1914
Part Five: Social Democracy and Its Enemies
21. WAR, REVOLUTION, AND REACTION, 1910-1925
22. LOOKING INTO THE ABYSS, 1920-1934
23. BIRTH PANGS OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, 1933-1940
24. FLAMES OF GLOBAL WAR, VISIONS OF GLOBAL PEACE, 1940-1945
25. COLD WAR AMERICA, 1945-1957
Part Six: Conservatism, Neoliberalism, and Militarism
26. REBELLION ON THE LEFT, RESURGENCE ON THE RIGHT, 1957-1968
27. DESTABILIZATIONS, 1968-1979
28. A NEW CONSERVATISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: 1980-1989
29. NEW WORLD DISORDER, 1989-2004
30. DESTINIES, 2005 - The Present
Appendix A: Historical Documents
Appendix B: Historical Facts and Data
Credits
Index
About the Author :
Steven Hahn earned his B.A. at the University of Rochester and his M.A. and Ph. D. at Yale University. He is a specialist on the social and political history of the nineteenth-century United States, on the history of the American South, on slavery, emancipation, and race, and on the development of American empire on the North American continent, in the Western Hemisphere, and in the Pacific world.
Dr. Hahn's books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003); The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (2009); A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016); and most recently, Illiberal America: A History (2024).
Hahn has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library. He has taught at the University of Delaware, the University of California San Diego, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently Professor of History at New
York University where he is also actively involved in the NYU Prison Education Program.
Review :
Forging America is superb: the treatment of power, conflict, and crisis within the US is convincingly located within the dynamics of global transformation. The narrative is illuminating and vivid - sometimes troubling, in the best of ways - as it charts how American history is marked not only by achievements won in the realms of equity, autonomy, and human dignity but also by longstanding as well as unprecedented threats to social justice and human survival. It judiciously explores clashing perspectives. And it highlights turning-points and ruptures, making contingency come alive while also tracing long patterns of change over time, helping students to understand the relationship between past and present."
-Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago
Forging America is a brilliant effort to reimagine the complex history of the United States by placing events in a global context, establishing the central role race and gender played in the emergence of the republic, and demanding that we recognize the nation's development as a contingent process rather than a pre-determined outcome. It demands that students reflect on history, consider alternative outcomes, and find viable explanations when confronted with a wide range of causal factors."
-Thomas Summerhill, Michigan State University
This is an innovative, sharply written, fast moving history of the United States, one that places the U.S. within broader worlds not of the country's own making. It demonstrates the role of everyday people, particularly non-white people, in shaping the country."
-Gregory P. Downs, University of California, Davis
Steven Hahn's Forging America is a tour-de-force. His fast-moving narrative provides a global history of US history while simultaneously centering the experiences of people of color whose lives are often marginalized in survey texts. It is a major scholarly achievement."
-Karlos K. Hill, University of Oklahoma
