African-American history, broadly defined, continues to be the most innovative and exciting field in American historical studies. The great upheaval of the nineteenth century, which saw millions of slaves becoming free as the result of a cataclysmic civil war and then struggling for decades to maintain and enhance that status against fierce white-supremacist opposition, has attracted the interest of many talented historians. Once thought to have been handed their freedom by benevolent whites, especially Abraham Lincoln, African-Americans are now generally viewed as the primary agents of their own emancipation. Had blacks not deserted the plantations and offered themselves en masse to the Union forces, it is quite conceivable that the Civil War would have ended with slavery still in place or, at best, in the process of very gradual elimination.

Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet is the most comprehensive account yet of black politics in the rural South before, during and after the Civil War. Whereas most previous work has focused either on the slave experience or on post-Emancipation struggles, Hahn's book encompasses both and shows the continuities between how blacks fought for self-determination in the two periods. To do this, of course, he must take an expansive view of politics, since slaves had no formal legal or political rights to speak of and were forbidden to organize themselves politically. For Hahn, all efforts by slaves to secure better living conditions and some communal autonomy--whatever the means--qualify as political action. Manifestations of the slaves' will to resist include wresting from the master the right to live in self-selected family units, have a garden plot, own and bequeath personal property, engage in petty trade and worship God in their own way.

Following the lead of earlier social historians, especially the late Herbert Gutman, Hahn finds that the strength and vitality of the slave community was derived primarily from a powerful sense of kinship or extended family that often went beyond actual blood ties. If American culture in general was highly individualistic, the black culture emerging from the slave experience was deeply rooted in closely knit families and interdependent, face-to-face communities. Hahn focuses on rural areas rather than cities, because it was there that a grassroots political ethos, based on what might be described as a kind of peasant communalism, came to full flower in the post-Emancipation era.

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