Jefferson Cowie

An epic account of how working class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s, this work is a wide ranging cultural and political history that presents the decade in a whole new light. The author's work, part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film, and TV lore, makes new sense of the 1970s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from the optimism of New Deal America...

"From the American Revolution to Black Lives Matter, Americans have come to associate freedom with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. Few ideas are as central to the national mythos. But whenever the federal government has taken a stand for racial minorities, however halfhearted, white Americans have been quick to weaponize the concept of freedom, framing the state itself as a tyrannical obstacle to their own liberties. In Freedom's Dominion,...

In the 1970s, disco dominated American pop music. Originating in nightclubs that featured record players instead of live bands, disco was a major stylistic departure from rock, and its rise to the top of the music charts signaled a cultural shift that some found threatening. Disco's roots lay in a gay urban subculture, and the artists who created it were largely African American and Latino. In the gay dance clubs where it flourished, disco was much...