Stayin’ Alive

The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

Jefferson Cowie

paperback

$21.95

NOW IN PAPERBACK:  Winner of the 2011 Merle Curti award, an epic account that recasts the 1970s as the key turning point in modern U.S. history, from the renowned historian
History from the bottom up without forgetting the way it all looked from the top.
—Tom Geoghegan, author of Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back

A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin’ Alive is prize-winning 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 rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present. 

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. 
Fall 2011
paperback
6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 488 pages
978-1-59558-707-7

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