Jefferson Cowie, associate professor of labor history in Cornell's ILR School, has been selected by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) to receive the 2011 Merle Curti Award, which is given annually for the best book published in American social or American intellectual history.

He will be presented the award March 19 at the organization's 104th annual meeting in Houston.

Cowie's book, "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class" (The New Press, 2010), moves between popular culture, campaign and electoral politics, and social science debates to offer "a compelling and devastating account of what happened to the American working class in the 1970s," wrote the award committee. "Cowie tracks major shifts in political and popular public discourse as class structure changed and a new and polarizing language for talking about it emerged. Analyzing the declining influence of organized labor from multiple vantage points, Cowie moves between the lived reality of working-class Americans and perceptions of that experience emanating from Washington, Wall Street and Hollywood."

The committee also called the book "an innovative contribution to both social and intellectual history," "a sustained meditation on the tragic irony of historically excluded groups gaining belated access to disappearing jobs" and "a critical prologue to the politics of public life from the Reagan era onward."

OAH is the largest professional organization dedicated to the teaching and study of the American past.