"What’s the Matter with American Freedom?"

Dr. Jefferson Cowie, Vanderbilt University

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. This lecture 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.

Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of four books on modern U.S. history, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom's Dominion, which is the subject of his Jackson Lecture.