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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In near epic proportions, Cowie covers . . . the demise of the mythic American working class. A must read.
Choice

Might be the most groundbreaking and original national history of a working class since
E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.
New Politics

[C]aptures the contradictory nature of 1970s politics better than almost any other [book] ever written about the period.
Dissent

[A] fun read with cultural insight that makes connections I hadn’t, from Saturday Night Fever to Dog Day Afternoon, Bruce Springsteen to Devo.
Salon.com