Jefferson Cowie on Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

Vanderbilt Professor Jefferson Cowie
talks with Doug Mishkin about his Pulitzer Prize-winning book:

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

Thursday, January 11, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern

Online via Zoom/Free and Open to All

In his new book, Vanderbilt historian Professor Jefferson Cowie tells the dramatic tale of generations of local fights against the federal government to prop up a particular version of American freedom: the freedom to oppress others. He tells this national story by generalizing from the history of Barbour County in Alabama, beginning with the locals’ oppression of the County’s Creek people, on through Barbour County native Governor George Wallace’s infamous 1963 exhortation of “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” and beyond.

Professor Cowie will be interviewed by Doug Mishkin, a frequent OLLI speaker and interviewer.

Professor Jefferson Cowie holds the James G. Stahlman Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University. His work in social and political history focuses on how class, inequality and labor shape American politics and culture. In 2023 his Freedom’s Dominion won the Pulitzer Prize for History. His other books include Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor; The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics; and Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. Stayin’ Alive received a number of “best book” awards, including: the 2011 Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History and the Merle Curti Award for the Best Book in Social and Intellectual History. 

In addition to his scholarship, Cowie’s essays and opinion pieces have also appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, TIME magazine, NPR Music, Chronicle of Higher Ed, American Prospect, Politico, Democracy, The New Republic, Inside Higher Ed, Dissent, and other popular outlets. The recipient of several fellowships, including most recently the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, he has also appeared in a variety of media outlets including CNN’s The Seventies, C‐Span’s Booknotes, NPR’s Weekend Edition, and, released just last week, the PBS documentary The War on Disco. 

Cowie has been teaching at Vanderbilt since 2016, where he moved after being at Cornell University for nineteen years. 

Free and open to all, but pre-registration is required. 

This event will be recorded and posted to our YouTube channel: OLLI: The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Berkshire Community College