Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Cowboys, Class Struggle, and the West

Click here to access this 55 minute interview with historian and author Mark Lause conducted by Sasha Lilley of KPFA radio, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California. This interview with Lause offers you the real history of cowboys and labor and their often violent conflicts with capitalists and their bosses in the late 1800s.
The cowboy is a mythified character in American society, conjuring up rugged individualism and masculine brawn, values dear to American capitalism. But historian Mark Lause suggests that when we think of the cowboy, we should think of a precarious wage worker.