Description

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Winner of the 2011 Merle Curti award, an epic account that recasts the 1970s as the key turning point in modern U.S. history, from the renowned historian

A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin' Alive is prizewinning historian Jefferson Cowie's remarkable account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s. In this edgy and incisive book--part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film and television lore--Cowie, with "an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America's fascinating path from rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.

About the Author

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Jefferson Cowie is a professor of labor history and the chair of the department of labor relations, law, and history at Cornell University. He is the author of Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (The New Press), which received the 2000 Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History, and of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press), which received the Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History from the Society of American Historians and the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Praise For…

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so fresh, fertile and real that the only thing it resembles is itselfYou just have to read it. It establishes its author as one our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience. It corrals all the generational energies coursing through the centrifuge of postbaby boomer 70s scholarship and churns them into the first compelling, coherent statement I’ve read of what happened in the '70sCowie's accomplishment is to convey what this epic cheat felt like from the inside.”Rick Perlstein, The Nation

If you want to understand how we got herehow the Democrats’ New Deal coalition shattered in the 1970s, and why progressives are still picking the shrapnel out of their political hidesyou must read Stayin' Alive. A fun read with cultural insightCowie is impossibly fair.”Joan Walsh, Salon.com