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

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An epic account of how middle-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s. This wide-ranging cultural and political history re-writes the 1970s as the crucial, pivotal era of modern times. Edgy and incisive - part political history, part labour history - with large doses of American musical, film and TV lore. From the factories of Ohio to Nixon, Ford and Carter's Washington, Cowie connects politics to culture, exposing how the 1970s saw a widening on inequalities and poverty.

Reviews

so fresh, fertile and real that the only thing it resembles is itselfYou just have to read it. It establishes its author as one our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience. It corrals all the generational energies coursing through the centrifuge of postbaby boomer 70s scholarship and churns them into the first compelling, coherent statement Ive read of what happened in the '70sCowie's accomplishment is to convey what this epic cheat felt like from the inside.Rick Perlstein, The Nation

If you want to understand how we got herehow the Democrats New Deal coalition shattered in the 1970s, and why progressives are still picking the shrapnel out of their political hidesyou must read Stayin' Alive. A fun read with cultural insightCowie is impossibly fair.Joan Walsh, Salon.com

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 Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History for 2000, and a co-editor of Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. He lives in Ithaca, New York.