Jefferson Cowie's edgy and incisive book makes new sense of the 1970s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from New Deal America, with its large, optimistic middle class, to the widening economic inequalities, poverty and dampened expectations of the 1980s and into the present. Cowie also connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the juke box can help understand how the US turned away from the radicalism of the 1960s toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan.

Author Biography

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.