The Daily Bulletin Archive

The 1970s will be "stayin’ alive" in Buffalo today, Wednesday, May 11, at 7:00 p.m. in the Burchfield Penney Art Center auditorium when Jefferson Cowie, an award-winning historian from Cornell University, gives a public lecture and multimedia presentation (featuring film and music from that fateful decade) on "A Nation Without Class: The 1970s and the Origins of Our Own Time."

Sponsored by the Cornell Club of Greater Buffalo, the Partnership for Public Good, Talking Leaves Books, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the talk is free and open to the public.

Cowie, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, has been called "One of our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience" by The Nation magazine.

He is the author of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which has won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. The annual award, intended "to stimulate the writing of history as literature," is made for a nonfiction book "on any aspect of the history of what is now the United States."

The book has also won the Organization of American Historians' 2011 Merle Curti Award for best book in social and intellectual history, and the United Association for Labor Education's 2011 Best Book Award. Stayin' Alive was also one of four finalists for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for the best book in all of nonfiction, sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. His first book, Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor, won the Taft Prize for the best book in labor history in 2000.

Noted Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote:

"Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive will long stand as the finest and most sophisticated portrait of politics and culture in the American 1970s, and also as a model for how to talk about both political and cultural transformations without shortchanging either. Ranging from Brooklyn to Lordstown, Ohio, and from Saturday Night Fever to Born to Run, Cowie traces how "a republic of anxiety overtook a republic of security" in the United States. Combining empathy with passion, Cowie makes understanding his goal and condescension his enemy. Americans living in 2011 will understand themselves far better because of Cowie's brilliant excavation of the 1970s."

Questions? Contact Cornell Club President, Matthew Nagowski at nagowski@cornell.edu.