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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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FREEDOM'S DOMINION

Jefferson Cowie

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.

Jefferson Cowie holds the James G. Stahlman chair in history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of three books, including Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, and his work has appeared in numerous outlets including Time, the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and Politico. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Published 2022-11-22 by Basic Books

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Freedom's Dominion w/ Jefferson Cowie (#255) Read more...

Join us when a prize-winning historian chronicles a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans' freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their way, on this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large. Read more...

...a gem of the new fatalism. Synthesizing brilliant research in fluent prose, and writing with an indignation that's all the more damning for being understated. Read more...

Interview with Jefferson Cowie... Read more...

The book made an appearance for "What We're Reading" in Arab News! Read more...

...Freedom's Dominion by Jefferson Cowie is a breakthrough in situating the Trump movement in its broadest historical context, though briefly acknowledging that is left for the very end of the book. Prof Cowie builds on the insight, best developed by the sociologist Orlando Patterson, that for many white Americans, and other some dominant communities around the world, "freedom" has meant the prerogative to oppress, dispossess, enslave or abuse others in the pursuit of the crudest individual and communal self-interest. The presumed loss of an assumed privilege of white Christian national pre-eminence is the primal fuel driving the Maga faction and its allies and antecedents... Read more...

FREEDOM'S DOMINION by Jefferson Cowie has won the Pulitzer Prize in History! Read more...

outstanding and urgent... a remarkable achievement, but it will likely engender considerable debate. Read more...

...important, deeply affecting - and regrettably relevant... essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the unholy union, more than 200 years strong, between racism and the rabid loathing of government... White men did all this in Barbour County, by design and without relent, and Cowie's account of their acts is unsparing. His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered... Read more...

...gripping and haunting... Cowie's meticulous accumulation of detail and candid assessments... make for distressing yet essential reading. This is history at its most vital. Read more...

A powerful history showing that White supremacist ideas of freedom are deeply embedded in American politics. Read more...

Jefferson Cowie's Q&A with Publishers Weekly Read more...