Historical Parallels: Federal Intervention and Racial Dynamics

Join Michael in his conversation with Professor Jefferson Cowie about his Pulitzer Prize winning book Freedom’s Dominion, A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power which 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.