History prof reflects on Pulitzer, research

Steven Hahn chose the University of Rochester for his undergraduate education because he wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. No one would have guessed that he would one day become a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.

Born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, Hahn joined Penn's faculty less than a year ago as the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History.

It was while at Rochester that Hahn's interests shifted from aircrafts to American history, as the political curiosity that was sparked during his youth and the Civil Rights movement was piqued by the Vietnam War.

"I was struggling to figure out what was going on in the world," Hahn says.

"For a lot of reasons history grabbed my attention because it seemed to ask the kind of questions that were very helpful, and it seemed concerned about people I was concerned about."

After studying at Rochester, he went on to receive his Ph.D. in history from Yale University.

Hahn is now a specialist on the social and political history of 19th-century America, the history of the American South, and the comparative history of slavery and emancipation. Before arriving at Penn, Hahn served on the faculties of the University of Delaware, the University of California at San Diego, and Northwestern University.

Just months after his arrival, Hahn received the Pulitzer Prize for history for his book A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.

While the book was 15 years in the making, Hahn's Pulitzer victory was rather unexpected, so it seems fitting that his seven-year-old daughter, Saoirse, referred to her father's accomplishment as "the Pulitzer surprise."

"I knew my book was nominated, I knew it got serious consideration, but I had no expectation that it would win," Hahn says. "I never imagined that I would win this prize."

According to Hahn, the book, which also won the Bancroft Prize for 2004, a distinguished honor in the field of history, "is about how both slaves and free people in the American South ... practiced politics and created political communities for themselves, both under slavery and after slavery."

As he wrote A Nation Under Our Feet, Hahn kept in mind the goal of creating a scholarly contribution that would also be accessible to a non-scholarly audience.

Hahn's passion for politics is part of what prompted him to write the award-winning book.

"To look back on a world where people who had been enslaved so eagerly participated in politics, often at such great risk, seemed to be just an extraordinary situation that I wanted to find out more about," Hahn says. "Here was a world where it wasn't particularly inconvenient to participate in politics; one's life was at risk."

Hahn was also motivated by the desire to study a group of people that may have been overlooked by other scholars.

"Most studies of political activities, even political movements, tend to look at leaders, and they tend in the South, of late, to look more at the urban than the rural countryside," Hahn says. "So I was interested in how people like that engaged in politics."

"We tend not to describe farm laborers who engage in political activity as 'extraordinary,' but they've taught me what 'extraordinary' really means," he added.

Clearly, the administration at Penn's history department thinks that Hahn has got a sufficient grasp on the word.

"We're thrilled that we recruited Steve Hahn from Northwestern a year and a half ago. It was a great fit to our department," says Bicentennial Class of 1940 Professor of History and Sociology Thomas Sugrue. "It helped us build strength."

Having read Hahn's first book, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890, as a graduate student, Sugrue adds, "I've long admired his scholarship. It's been a real model for my own."

There is mutual admiration between Hahn and his colleagues.

"The Penn History Department, in my view, is, I think, the best in the country right now," Hahn says.

Currently, Hahn lives in Bryn Mawr with his wife, fellow Penn History Professor Stephanie McCurry, and their two children, Saoirse and 10-year-old son Declan. He is an avid traveler, with Italy being among his favorite destinations.

Hahn is now at work on two projects, the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures in African-American History to be delivered at Harvard University in 2007 and a history of the United States for the years 1840-1900 to be published as part of a broader U.S. history by Penguin Group. He insists that, although publication offers have understandably come his way as a result of the Pulitzer announcement, he would not want to teach less in favor of writing more.

"I don't want to just pack my bags and hit the road ... not that there's that much demand for me anyway," he jokes.

Of teaching, Hahn says, "All you can do is make available a whole variety of ways of thinking about things and challenge them."

"People appear and evaporate in the records," Hahn says of studying history specifically, "You have them for a moment, and then you try and figure out: what can you make out of what you have?"

"They have things to tell us. We just have to figure out how to hear them."

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