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Jefferson Cowie's edgy and incisive book 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. Cowie also connects politics to
culture, showing how the big screen and the juke box can help
understand how the US turned away from the radicalism of the 1960s
toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY American freedom is
typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better
world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government
intervened on behalf of non-white people, many white Americans
fought back in the name of freedom-their freedom to dominate
others. In Freedom's Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces
this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place:
Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand
George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism and chattel
slavery, white people weaponized freedom to seize Native lands,
champion secession, overthrow Reconstruction, question the New
Deal, and fight against the civil rights movement. A riveting
history of the long-running clash between white people and federal
authority, this book radically shifts our understanding of what
freedom means in America.
Bruce Springsteen might be the quintessential American rock
musician but his songs have resonated with fans from all walks of
life and from all over the world. This unique collection features
reflections from a diverse array of writers who explain what
Springsteen means to them and describe how they have been moved,
shaped, and challenged by his music. Â Contributors to Long
Walk Home include novelists like Richard Russo, rock critics like
Greil Marcus and Gillian Gaar, and other noted Springsteen scholars
and fans such as A. O. Scott, Peter Ames Carlin, and Paul Muldoon.
They reveal how Springsteen’s albums served as the soundtrack to
their lives while also exploring the meaning of his music and the
lessons it offers its listeners. The stories in this collection
range from the tale of how “Growin’ Up” helped a lonely
Indian girl adjust to life in the American South to the saga of a
group of young Australians who turned to Born to Run to cope with
their country’s 1975 constitutional crisis. These essays examine
the big questions at the heart of Springsteen’s music,
demonstrating the ways his songs have resonated for millions of
listeners for nearly five decades. Â Commemorating the
Boss’s seventieth birthday, Long Walk Home explores
Springsteen’s legacy and provides a stirring set of testimonials
that illustrate why his music matters.
Where 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.
The immediate impact of deindustrialization—the suffering
inflicted upon workers, their families, and their communities—has
been widely reported by scholars and journalists. In this important
volume, the authors seek to move discussion of America's industrial
decline beyond the immediate ramifications of plant shutdowns by
placing it into a broader social, political, and economic context.
Emphasizing a historical approach, the authors explore the multiple
meanings of one of the major transformations of the twentieth
century.The concept of deindustrialization entered the popular and
scholarly lexicon in 1982 with the publication of The
Deindustrialization of America, by Barry Bluestone and Bennett
Harrison. Beyond the Ruins both builds upon and departs from the
insights presented in that benchmark study. In this volume, the
authors rethink the chronology, memory, geography, culture, and
politics of industrial change in America.Taken together, these
original essays argue that deindustrialization is not a story of a
single emblematic place, such as Flint or Youngstown, or a specific
time period, such as the 1980s. Nor is it limited to the abandoned
factory buildings associated with heavy industry. Rather,
deindustrialization is a complex process that is uneven in its
causes, timing, and consequences. The essays in this volume examine
this process through a wide range of topics, from worker narratives
and media imagery, to suburban politics, environmental activism,
and commemoration.
American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the
oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the
federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many
white Americans fought back in the name of freedom-their freedom to
dominate others. In Freedom's Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie
traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American
place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political
firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism
and chattel slavery, white people weaponized freedom to seize
Native lands, champion secession, overthrow Reconstruction,
question the New Deal, and fight against the civil rights movement.
A riveting history of the long-running clash between white people
and federal authority, this book radically shifts our understanding
of what freedom means in America.
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 manufacturers is
vividly chronicled in this fascinating account of RCA's half
century-long search for desirable sources of labor. Capital Moves
introduces us to the people most affected by the migration of
industry and, most importantly, recounts how they came to fight
against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor."Jefferson
Cowie tells the dramatic story of four communities, each
irrevocably transformed by the opening of an industrial plant. From
the manufacturer's first factory in Camden, New Jersey, where it
employed large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants,
RCA moved to rural Indiana in 1940, hiring Americans of
Scotch-Irish descent for its plant in Bloomington. Then, in the
volatile 1960s, the company relocated to Memphis where African
Americans made up the core of the labor pool. Finally, the company
landed in northern Mexico in the 1970s a region rapidly becoming
one of the most industrialized on the continent."
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