Jefferson Cowie teaches history in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.
Review
"A conceptually rich and deeply humane book."
--Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History
"Capital Moves is must reading for those who want to understand the forces that have reshaped the American
and global economies over the last half-century."
--Thomas J. Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania
"Capital Moves is a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery that links the present
with the past in a fashion that is exciting and suggestive."
--Nelson Lichtenstein, University of Virginia
New Press Web Site, January, 2002
Summary
Globalization is the lead story of the new century, but its roots reach back nearly one hundred years, to major
corporations' quest for stable, inexpensive, and pliant sources of labor. Before the largest companies moved beyond
national boundaries, they crossed state lines, abandoning the industrial centers of the Eastern Seaboard for impoverished
rural communities in the Midwest and South. In their wake they left the decaying urban landscapes and unemployment
rates that became hallmarks of late-twentieth-century America. This is the story that Jefferson Cowie, in "a
stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery" (Nelson Lichtenstein), tells through
the lens of a single American corporation, RCA.
Capital Moves takes us through the interconnected histories of Camden, New Jersey; Bloomington, Indiana; Memphis,
Tennessee; and Juárez, Mexico�four cities radically transformed by America's leading manufacturer of records
and radio sets. In a sweeping narrative of economic upheaval and class conflict, Cowie weaves together the rich
detail of local history with the national�and ultimately international�story of economic and social change.
