Ithaca College

Dr. Jefferson Cowie will give the history department's Spring 2011 Marjorie Fortunoff Mayrock Lecture at 6 PM on April 28 in Textor 101.  Dr. Cowie's talk, "A Nation without Class: The 1970s and the Origins of Our Own Time," is based on his prize-winning 2010 book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.

This edgy and incisive book---part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film and TV lore--reveals America’s fascinating and little understood path from the rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and deflated expectations of the present.  The Mayrock talk will focus particular attention of the ways popular culture reflected the changes of the American working class in the 1970s and the implications of these changes for our own time.