Stayin' Alive

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.

“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