Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government has intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, white Americans have fought back by invoking freedom--their freedom to dominate others.

In Freedom's Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie 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, oppose Reconstruction, question the New Deal, and fight desegregation and civil rights laws.

A riveting history of the long-running clash between white people and federal authority, this book radically shifts our understanding of what freedom means in America.