Details

ISBN-10: 1541672801
ISBN-13: 9781541672802
Publisher: Basic Books
Publish Date: 11/22/2022
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.20" W, 2.50" H

Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

Hardcover

Price: $35.00

Overview

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY

An “important, deeply affecting–and regrettably relevant” (New York Times) chronicle of a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans’ freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their way.

American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom–their freedom to dominate others.

In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism and chattel slavery, white people weaponized freedom to seize Native lands, champion secession, overthrow Reconstruction, question the New Deal, and fight against the civil rights movement. A riveting history of the long-running clash between white people and federal authority, this book radically shifts our understanding of what freedom means in America.

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Reviews
"Jefferson Cowie's Freedom's Dominion is a magisterial narrative history of white grievance politics. Cowie reveals the origins of these often hypocritical and confounding perspectives, in which those who stole, enslaved, and segregated would themselves claim to be victims of federal overreach, even as they oppressed so many others. Cowie's terrific book explains the Southern roots of that racialized ideology and reveals how one of the most influential segregationist rhetoricians of the 1960s helped repackage this powerful form of regional white identity politics for the rest of the nation."
William Sturkey, author of Hattiesburg
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Details

ISBN-10: 1541672801
ISBN-13: 9781541672802
Publisher: Basic Books
Publish Date: 11/22/2022
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.20" W, 2.50" H
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