One of the newest members of Penn’s faculty is now its sixth Pulitzer Prize winner.
Steven Hahn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History, received the 2004 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” (Belknap/Harvard, 2003). The book documents the ways in which Southern blacks organized and fought for political power and rights, in the process challenging conventional views of slaves and their descendants as politically passive.
“My hope was to write a book that would be accessible to both a scholarly and a non-scholarly audience, and I had no idea whether that would work. I guess it may have worked,” Hahn said of his honor.
The Pulitzer is the second major prize Hahn has received for the book. Last month, “A Nation Under Our Feet” received the Bancroft Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for books on American history. Hahn joined the Penn faculty in October, 2003.
Originally published on April 15, 2004