Bøger af Jefferson Cowie

A prize-winning historian chronicles a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans' freedom to oppress people of color

An epic account of how middle-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s, this wide-ranging cultural and political history rewrites the 1970s as the crucial, pivotal era of our time. Jefferson Cowie's edgy and incisive book--part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American musical, film, and TV lore--makes new sense of the 1970s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from New Deal America (with its large, optimistic middle class) to the widening economic inequalities, poverty, and dampened expectations of the 1980s and into the present. "Stayin' Alive" takes us from the factory floors of Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Cowie also connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the 1960s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan. Cowie makes unexpected connections between the secrets of the Nixon White House and the failings of George McGovern campaign; radicalism and the blue-collar backlash; the earthy twang of Merle Haggard's country music and the falsetto highs of "Saturday Night Fever." Like Jeff Perlstein's acclaimed "Nixonland, ""Stayin' Alive" moves beyond conventional understandings of the period and brilliantly plumbs it for insights into our current way of life.

Find a pool of cheap, pliable workers and give them jobs-and soon they cease to be as cheap or as pliable. What is an employer to do then? Why, find another poor community desperate for work. This route-one taken time and again by major American...

An epic account of how middle-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s

How the New Deal was a unique historical moment and what this reveals about U.S. politics, economics, and cultureWhere does the New Deal fit in the big picture of American history? What does it mean for us today? What happened to the economic equality it once engendered? In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie provides new answers to these important questions. In the period between the Great Depression and the 1970s, he argues, the United States government achieved a unique level of equality, using its considerable resources on behalf of working Americans in ways that it had not before and has not since. If there is to be a comparable battle for collective economic rights today, Cowie argues, it needs to build on an understanding of the unique political foundation for the New Deal. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the politics of inequality in the United States will need to read The Great Exception.