- Publisher: The New Press
- ISBN: 9781595587077
- Price: $24.95 CAD
- Publication Date: Feb 2012
- Rights: Canada
- Pages: 488
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Examination Copy
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Request Exam CopyStayin’ Alive
The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
Jefferson Cowie
A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin’ Alive is a 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 TV lore—Cowie, with “an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America’s fascinating and little-understood path from the rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.
Hailed by Rick Perlstein in The Nation as “one [of] our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience,” prizewinning labor historian Jefferson Cowie takes us from the factory floors of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, connecting politics and culture, and showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the 1960s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan.
Contents
· Introduction: Something’s Happening to People Like Me
Book 1: Hope in the Confusion, 1968–1974
1. Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class
2. What Kind of Delegation is This?
3. Nixon’s Class Struggle
4. I’m Dying Here
Book 2: Despair in the Order, 1974–1982
5. A Collective Sadness
6. The New Deal that Never Happened
7. The Important Sound of Things Falling Apart
8. Dead Man’s Town
· Notes
· Index
About the Author
Jefferson Cowie is an associate professor of 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 Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History for 2000. He lives in Ithaca, New York.