A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade,Stayin’ Aliveis 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
Jefferson Cowieis an associate professor of history at Cornell University. He is the author ofCapital 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. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
“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
“One of the best books of 2010.”
—Joan Walsh,Salon
“Might be the most groundbreaking alÓ+
![Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/9/6/0/2_150524.jpg)