Forging America: Volume One to 1877: A Continental History of the United States

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.


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. His 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.