JEFFERSON COWIE
Historian
Winner of the 2023
Pulitzer Prize
for History
"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."
-Pulitzer citation
"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 .... His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered…”
New York Times Book Review
(cover review)
About Freedom's Dominion:
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. 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.
Freedom's Dominion 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.
Links to Selected Reviews and Interviews:
Review in the London Review of Books
Review in Publisher's Weekly (starred)
Interview WPLN, This is Nashville
Interview Chapter 16
Video w Aziz Rana at Buffalo St
Video w Washington History Seminar
Video w Sam Seder Majority Report
Podcast: Working History
Podcast: How to Save a Country
Podcast: Road to Now
Excerpt Lit Hub
Page 99 Test
"Outstanding and urgent...a remarkable achievement"
The New Republic
"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."
The Atlantic
"Gripping and haunting…history at its most vital."
Publisher's Weekly, starred review
"Cowie has a knack for publishing instant classics…his most extraordinary yet"
Rick Perlstein
"A new way of thinking about the psychic structure of American exceptionalism"
Greg Grandin
"A fascinating book…a searing account….leaves one wondering whether American freedom can ever be separated from the causes it has supported"
Mia Bay
"A magisterial narrative…a terrific book"
William Sturkey
Advance Praise for Freedom's Dominion:
“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.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Jefferson Cowie has a knack for publishing instant classics: books that change historians' conversations. This is his most extraordinary yet. With eloquence and with brilliance, he delves deep into the annals of a specific place, Barbour County, Alabama, in order to excavate the foundations of America's darkest and most enduring story: how 'freedom' became a national alibi for cruelty, inequity, and reaction. As soon as I finished reading it, I wanted to start over and absorb it all over again."
—Rick Perlstein, author of Reaganland: America's Right Turn, 1976-1980
Jefferson Cowie has given us a deep history of the long war on the federal government, especially when it came to policies advancing class and race equality, of the evolution of White grievance politics, and a new way of thinking about the psychic structure of American Exceptionalism. With eloquent, precise prose, Cowie clears away the cobwebs to reveal a national malady long in the making.
—Greg Grandin, author of End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
“A fascinating book, Freedom’s Dominion takes us to the states’-rights stronghold of Barbour County, Alabama. Barbour was the birthplace of Governor George Wallace, whose infamous defense of segregation described integration as tyranny, segregation as freedom, and equal access to the ballot as a threat to individual rights. Wallace’s views illustrate the confounding interdependence of ideas about freedom and oppression in American politics—as does Barbour County’s long history of state-building rooted in antiblack violence, white supremacist rule, and Indian land dispossession. Freedom’s Dominion offers a searing account of that history that leaves one wondering whether American freedom can ever be disentangled from the causes it has supported.”
—Mia Bay, author of Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
“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: An American City in Black and White
George Wallace campaigns in front of the hometown crowd in Barbour County, Alabama in 1958. He built upon political messages that began during the elimination of the Creek people and the creation of a slave-based economy. He honed an inherited definition of white freedom as freedom from the tyranny of federal power, which threatened whites' political and economic control over life in Barbour County--and the nation.