ILR School Associate Professor Jefferson Cowie's "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class" has won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. He will receive the award May 16. The annual award, intended "to stimulate the writing of history as literature," is made for a nonfiction book "on any aspect of the history of what is now the United States."

In addition to teaching labor history at the ILR School, Cowie teaches in Cornell's Department of History and American Studies Program. He also serves as house professor and dean of Keeton House.

"Stayin' Alive," published in 2010, also won the Merle Curti Award for best book in American social and intellectual history from the Organization of American Historians and the Best Book Award from the United Association for Labor Education. The book interprets America's shift from New Deal optimism to broader economic inequalities.

Cowie, a social and political historian, studies how class, inequality and work shape postwar American politics and culture.