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-oftentimes involving struggle and conflict-went into the forging of a nation.

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.

Maps, Tables, and Figures
Features
Sources for Forging America
Preface
Learning Resources for Forging America
Acknowledgments
About the Author

Part One: New Worlds for All

1. Beginnings to 1519

2. Contact Zones 1450-1600

3. Settler Colonies and Imperial Rivalries 1585-1681

4. Colonial Convulsions and Rebellions 1640-1700

Part Two: Revolutions and Reversals

5. Colonial Societies and Contentious Empires1625-1786

6. Global War and American Independence 1750-1776

7. A Political Revolution 1776-1791

8. Securing a Republic, Imagining an Empire 1789-1815

Part Three: Unmaking a Slaveholders' Republic

9. Expansion and Its Discontents, 1815-1840

10. Social Reform, and the New Politics of Slavery 1820-1840

11. Warring for the Pacific 1836-1848

12. Coming Apart 1848-1857

13. A Slaveholders' Rebellion 1856-1861

14. The War of the Rebellion 1861-1863

15. Ending the Rebellion and Re(constructing) the Nation 1863-1865

Part Four: Industrial Society and Its Discontents

16. The Promise and Limits of Reconstruction 1863-1877

Appendix A: Historical Documents
Appendix B: Historical Facts and Data
Photo Credits
Index