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

ISBN: 1541605128

Author: Cowie, Jefferson

Condition: New

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY  An important, deeply affecting-and regrettably relevant (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their wayAmerican 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 Freedoms Dominion, prizewinning 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, freedom became a weapon. With freedom as their cry, white Americans seized Native lands, championed secession, overthrew Reconstruction, questioned the New Deal, and fought against the civil rights movement.    Through a riveting account of two centuries of local clashes between white people and federal authorities, Freedoms Dominion offers a radically new history of federal power, democracy, and American freedom. This history summons us today to embrace a vigorous model of American citizenship, backed by a federal government that is not afraid to fight the many incarnations of the freedom to dominate.