Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

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Description

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.

Reviews

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 Cowies 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 and original national history of a working class since E.P. Thompsons Making of the English Working Class.
Steven Colatrella, New Politics

Author Bio

Jefferson Cowie is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. He is the author of Capital Moves: RCAs 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.