Jefferson Cowie, Vanderbilt University
April 3, 2025, 4pm
Hope Room, Higgins Welcome Center & Livestreamed

In his talk, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie will argue that the state of contemporary affairs stems not from the intricacies of recent political contests but from three major historical currents. The first is a longstanding structural weakness in American liberal institutions. The second current is deindustrialization and the erosion of US working-class power since the 1970s, which has led to high levels of wage stagnation and economic inequality, and also to the resurgence of an old theme in American populism: the nostalgic rage to reclaim lost glories of a “golden age.” These trends, deeply embedded in the American past, have converged in the twenty-first century with a third current—the volatile churn caused by a faltering global political order.

Jefferson Cowie’s work in social and political history focuses on how class, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. The Nation magazine described him as “one of our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience.” His most recent book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, won the Pulitzer Prize for History and tells the tale of generations of local fights against the federal government that prop up a particular version of American freedom: the freedom to oppress others.

Cowie’s other texts include, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (winner of the Francis Parkman Prize the Best Book in American History and the Merle Curti Award for the Best Book in Social and Intellectual History), and Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (winner of the Phillip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History). Cowie is a passionate and dedicated educator, garnering a number of teaching awards during his career. From 2008 to 2012, he served as the first House Professor and Dean of William Keeton House on Cornell’s innovative West Campus. He serves on the Board of Trustees for Deep Springs College. Cowie holds the James G. Stahlman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University.