Jefferson Cowie

Jefferson Cowie, holds the James G. Stahlman Chair at Vanderbilt University. His work focuses on how inequality and democracy work in American history. In 2023, he won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022). That book tells the dramatic tale of generations of local fights against the federal government to preserve a particular version of American freedom: the freedom to oppress others. He is also the author of The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016) and Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010), which received a number of “best book” awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize and the Merle Curti Award. Cowie also wrote Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor, which received the 2000 Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History. Cowie’s essays and opinion pieces have appeared in a number popular outlets, and he has been the recipient of fellowships including Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the American Council of Learned Societies and Andrew Mellon Foundation.