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Jefferson Cowie is James G. Stahlman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in History.
Jefferson Cowie speaks with Aziz Rana about whether the language of freedom can be taken back from its "sordid history" in the U.S. context.
Talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.
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For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster.