Steven Hahn (1) (1951–)

I might have gotten more out of this one had I spent more time with the physical book rather than the audio (in which the narrator pronounced "antebellum" as "ant-eye-bellum" for the first 11 chapters and used sometimes unsettling accents) and if I had made a timeline and running list of characters, but even without those, I think I have a much better sense of the rhetoric and forces that shaped the US during the 19th century and how remarkable and almost accidental the stability of the 20th century was.

Of particular note is how adept the powerful/wealthy are at intentionally fooling the population that their needs are one and the same. I also learned that corporate personhood began in the 19th c. with the active assistance of a SCOTUS that was hesitant (at best) about the personhood of actual persons who weren't white and male. I also learned how easy it is for a popular movement to get derailed by infighting and how cobbled together our financial system is. I was hoping for some greater insights into the current climate in the US, and I did get some of those but unfortunately no ideas for how to proceed wisely (just lots of lessons on what not to do).… (mais)

A Nation Without Borders is the 3rd book in the Penguin History of the United States. There are five volumes in the series, which offer a comprehensive history of the United States from the colonial period to the 20th century. The series seeks to bring American History in a coherent and accessible form to the public.

I love history. But I cannot tackle a book with so much information in its pages like I would a story or a work of fiction. I worked my way through this book from cover to cover over time, learning a little bit and then doing further reading on the people, events and places mentioned in the chapters. For me, it was a bit like a self study college course. I like how the 80 years covered by this book are presented with a more global and diverse attitude, rather than the limited manner American history was taught to be in school. This book goes much more in depth about the contributions to American history of Mexico, native tribes, slaves, women...and incorporates that information into the history as a whole rather than skimming over it only as a means to an end.

The information is presented in a very readable way. While it is still possible to get bogged down in a 500-page comprehensive history of 8 decades, Steven Hahn did an excellent job of presenting the facts in a way that anyone can read and understand. It doesn't come off like a high-brow, stuffy scholarly regurgitation of facts, but an interesting overview of a very important time in the development of America.

Now that I've read my way through the 3rd volume in the Penguin series on American History, I'd love to read the other four books! It will take me awhile to work my way through all of the information, but it will be time well spent.

Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author of A Nation Under Our Feet.

**I won a copy of this book in a Goodreads Giveaway. While I appreciate the free book, the giveaway had no effect on the honesty of my review. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.**



… (mais)

I really don't think it's fair to argue that an author should have undertaken a different project than the one that he chose. But at the same time, I really feel that Hahn's arguments would have been a lot stronger if each of the three essays in this book had been a fully researched and documented book of its own. (Especially since the third essay does not seem to flow naturally from the first two.)

I think Hahn adds a lot to the historiography of slavery in the Americas: for example, the idea of writing about slavery as a national rather than local phenomenon and connecting slavery in the United States to slavery in Cuba and Haiti and so on. I think that's a very useful idea and a massive book could be written on that alone. I also liked the discussion about the fugitive slave communities in the North. I found the treatment of Marcus Garvey's ideas fascinating. But this book is 162 pages of text. There isn't enough room to fully discuss any of these topics.… (mais)

I guess this is supposed to be a retelling of US history with a lot more emphasis on relations with native tribes, other Europeans on the continent, and Mexico, to give it that transAtlantic flavor. I ended up thinking that this pudding had no theme, which in fairness may be the American story. I did get a good reminder that American politicians, particularly in the South, have a long history of suppressing votes; white male voter turnout in many Southern counties in the 19th century was 30% or so despite the supposed enfranchisement of white men, and that was no accident.… (mais)