Steven Howard Hahn (born 1951) is Professor of History atNew York University.^[1]

Hahn was born on July 18, 1951, in New York City. Educated at theUniversity of Rochester, where he worked withEugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman,^{[citation needed]} Hahn received his PhD degree fromYale University.^[2] His dissertation was overseen byC. Vann Woodward, and laterHoward R. Lamar.

He has written on the South, slavery and emancipation, the Populist Era, rural cultures, and social migration. His first book wasThe Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (Oxford University Press, 1983). This study was important because it provided a detailed and original account of the political ideology of white southern small farmers. At the time this group, the majority of the American South, had received relatively little scholarly attention. Hahn presented the southern yeomen as non-capitalist in crucial respects, and describes how they were undermined by the increasing commercialization of Southern agriculture after the Civil War. Populists were presented as having had almost no interest in a genuinely biracial polity.

In 2003 Hahn published his second bookA Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, which won the 2004Pulitzer Prize for History. Several historians have noted that in this book a union of black and white workers is presented as a much more likely possibility. In 2009 he publishedThe Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, a version of the Nathan I. Huggins Lecture he delivered at Harvard University two years earlier.A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars was published in 2016 by Penguin Press. His latest book isIlliberal America - A History, published by W. W. Norton & Company in May 2025.

Hahn has won a number of teaching awards and has been supported in his research by theGuggenheim Foundation, theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Hahn has taught at the University of Delaware, the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. He has two children, Declan Hahn and Saoirse, and lives in New York City.

• 1980Allan Nevins Prize of theSociety of American Historians, for his doctoral dissertation,The Roots of Southern Populism^[3]
• 1984Frederick Jackson Turner Award of theOrganization of American Historians, forThe Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890
• 2004Pulitzer Prize for History, forA Nation Under Our Feet
• 2004Bancroft Prize, forA Nation Under Our Feet
• Merle Curti Award in Social History from theOrganization of American Historians

• Steven Hahn; Jonathan Prude, eds. (1985).The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America. University of North Carolina Press.ISBN 978-0-8078-4139-6.Steven Hahn.
• Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Series III: Land and Labor in 1865. Cambridge University Press. 2004.
• A Nation Under our Feet. Harvard University Press. 2003.ISBN 978-0-674-01169-4.Steven Hahn.
• Steven Hahn (2006).The roots of southern populism: yeoman farmers and the transformation of the Georgia upcountry, 1850-1890. Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-530670-5.
• Steven Hahn (2009).The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Harvard University Press.ISBN 978-0-674-03296-5.Steven Hahn.
• Steven Hahn (2017).A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars. Penguin Books.ISBN 978-0-143-12178-7.
• Steven Hahn (2024).Illiberal America: a History. W. W. Norton & Company.ISBN 978-0-393-63592-8.

• Faculty page at NYU
• "Steven Hahn",Penn Current, Sandy Smith, April 29, 2004
• Appearances onC-SPAN

• 21st-century American historians
• American male non-fiction writers
• Historians of the United States
• Populism scholars
• Pulitzer Prize for History winners
• New York University faculty
• University of Rochester alumni
• Yale University alumni
• Living people
• 1951 births
• Bancroft Prize winners
• 21st-century American male writers

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