|
History Professor Jefferson Cowie on The 70s -- May 11th The Cornell Club of Greater Buffalo, in cooperation with the Buffalo ILR Center, the Partnership for the Public Good, Talking Leaves Books, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Cornell University cordially invites the entire Buffalo community to a free public lecture by the Cornell University historian and professor, Jefferson Cowie, on: featuring a multimedia presentation of music and film from 70s culture Wednesday May 11th 2011 Following the lecture, Cowie will be signing copies of his award winning 'Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class', courtesy of Talking Leaves Books. Thereafter, the Club will be inviting all Cornellians to a post-lecture reception at Allentown Hardware.   Jefferson Cowie, Associate Professor of history at Cornell University, has been called "one of our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience" by The Nation magazine. 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. More recently, Cowie is the author of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which 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. Noted Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that: 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. A passionate and dedicated educator, Cowie is the recipient of several teaching awards. He is also the House Professor and Dean of Cornell's William Keeton House, a campus residential complex dedicated to uniting living and learning, where he resides with his family and over three hundred undergraduates. |
