Böcker av Steven Hahn

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A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of 6 January 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking "That's not us". But Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in America's past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set the United States apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status or ideology.Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fuelled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernised during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history and how that history bears on the present crisis.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's "breathtakingly original" (Junot Diaz) reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War. "Capatious [and] buzzing with ideas." --The Boston Globe Volume 3 in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and, throughout, is internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of "sectionalism," emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the northeast and Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy. It places the Civil War in the context of many domestic rebellions against state authority, including those of Native Americans. It fully incorporates the trans-Mississippi west, suggesting the importance of the Pacific to the imperial vision of political leaders and of the west as a proving ground for later imperial projects overseas. It reconfigures the history of capitalism, insisting on the centrality of state formation and slave emancipation to its consolidation. And it identifies a sweeping era of "reconstructions" in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that simultaneously laid the foundations for corporate liberalism and social democracy. The era from 1830 to 1910 witnessed massive transformations in how people lived, worked, thought about themselves, and struggled to thrive. It also witnessed the birth of economic and political institutions that still shape our world. From an agricultural society with a weak central government, the United States became an urban and industrial society in which government assumed a greater and greater role in the framing of social and economic life. As the book ends, the United States, now a global economic and political power, encounters massive warfare between imperial powers in Europe and a massive revolution on its southern border―the remarkable Mexican Revolution―which together brought the nineteenth century to a close while marking the important themes of the twentieth.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Hahn challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from 18th-century slave emancipations through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the 20th century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms.

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people-an embryonic black nation. As Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building.