PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY! A "significant, deeply moving - and unfortunately timely" (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of an underground idea of freedom: the freedom of white Americans to oppress others and their resistance against the government that hindered them. American freedom is usually associated with the struggle of the oppressed for a better world. However, for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of non-white people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom - their freedom to dominate others. In Freedom's Dominion, the award-winning historian Jefferson Cowie explores this complex saga centered around a specifically American place: Barbour County in Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by colonization and slavery, freedom became a weapon. With the cry of freedom, white Americans seized native lands, defended secession, overturned Reconstruction, challenged the New Deal, and fought against the civil rights movement. Through a gripping narrative of two centuries of local conflicts between whites and federal authorities, Freedom's Dominion offers a radically new history of federal power, democracy, and American freedom. This story calls on us today to embrace a dynamic model of American citizenship, supported by a federal government unafraid to combat the many expressions of freedom to dominate.