Stayin' Alive - by Jefferson Cowie (Paperback)

About the Book

A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, "Stayin' Alive" is prize-winning 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.
Winner of the 2011 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the Best Book on American History
Winner of the 2011 Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the Best Book in American Social History
Winner of the 2011 Labor History Best Book Prize
Winner of the 2011 Best Book Award from the United Association for Labor Education

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Will long stand as the finest and most sophisticated portrait of politics and culture in the American 1970s."

--E.J. Dionne

"Gives the best sense of the way that it felt to live through the decade . . . Cowie's book captures the contradictory nature of the 1970s politics better than almost any other ever written about the period."

--Kim Phillips-Fein, Dissent

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

--Steven Colatrella, New Politics

About the Author

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.