Jefferson Cowie Bücher

A prize-winning historian chronicles a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans' freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their way.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY - An "important, deeply affecting--and regrettably relevant" (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans' freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their way 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, prizewinning 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, freedom became a weapon. With freedom as their cry, white Americans seized Native lands, championed secession, overthrew Reconstruction, questioned the New Deal, and fought against the civil rights movement. Through a riveting account of two centuries of local clashes between white people and federal authorities, Freedom's Dominion offers a radically new history of federal power, democracy, and American freedom. This history summons us today to embrace a vigorous model of American citizenship, backed by a federal government that is not afraid to fight the many incarnations of the freedom to dominate.

The book explores the transformative political and economic shifts of the 1970s, framing it as a pivotal era that reshaped middle-class America. By blending political intrigue with labor history and cultural references from music, film, and television, it provides a nuanced understanding of this decade. The narrative highlights the transition from the optimistic New Deal era to the growing economic disparities and challenges that emerged in the 1980s, offering insights into the roots of contemporary societal issues.

How the New Deal was a unique historical moment and what this reveals about U.S. politics, economics, and culture 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.

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.