Jefferson Cowie
Called "one of our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience" by The Nation, Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman Professor at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016); Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010), winner of several "best book" awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize and the OAH Merle Curti Awards; and Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (2001), which won the Phillip Taft Labor History Book Award. Cowie's essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the American Prospect, the New Republic, Dissent, and other popular publications. He has also appeared in a variety of media outlets, including C‐SPAN's "Booknotes" and NPR’s "Weekend Edition," as well as documentaries. He is currently working on a short book on the New Deal and a long book on the global history of the wage.
Lectures
- A Nation without Class: A Social History of Inequality since the 1970s
- Are We in a New Age? The Techno-Global Meets the Ethno-Fundamental *
- Defining White Freedom in America, from Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump *
- Individualism and Democracy: Bridging Democratic Theory with Bruce Springsteen
- Stayin' Alive: Class and Popular Culture in the 1970s
- The Deep History of Backlash America *
- The Long Exception: Rethinking the New Deal in American History
- The Social History of the Trump Vote, 1968–2016 *
Lectures marked with a * are offered as part of the OAH's initiative, Historians' Perspectives on the Rise of Donald Trump.
