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

by Jefferson R. Cowie

Overview

A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin' Alive is prizewinning 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 the 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 Histories 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595587077
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	01/03/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	468
Sales rank:	130,627
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

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 2000 Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Something's Happening to People Like Me 1

Book 1 Hope in the Confusion, 1968-1974 21

1 Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class 23

2 What Kind of Delegation Is This? 75

3 Nixon's Class Struggle 125

4 I'm Dying Here 167

Book 2 Despair in the Order, 1974-1982 211

5 A Collective Sadness 213

6 The New Deal that Never Happened 261

7 The Important Sound of Things Falling Apart 313

8 Dead Man's Town 357

Acknowledgments 371

Notes 375

Index 447

Editorial 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 … 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 and original national history of a working class since E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.”
—Steven Colatrella, New Politics

From the Publisher