Building an American Empire with Paul Frymer

The Dig

Daniel Denvir

News, Politics

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2018

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We are living on land from which indigenous people, over hundreds of years, were violently removed. On some level, everyone knows this—yet it’s mostly nowhere to be found in stories that Americans tell themselves about who we are as a country, and how we got here. Dan’s guest is Paul Frymer (@pfrymer), a professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. In his recent book, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion, he provides a close study of the empire America built in the late 18th and 19th century, a project of geographic expansion facilitated and also limited by the demands of racial engineering. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike And from University of California Press: Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World by Isa Blumi ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520296145

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters on Patreon and by Verso Books,
0:06.7	which has loads of great left-wing titles perfect for dig listeners like you.
0:12.8	One that you might like is The Great Cowboy Strike, Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Laos.
0:23.6	In the pantheon of American icons, the cowboy embodies the traits of rugged individualism,
0:30.8	independent, solitary, and stoical. In reality, cowboys were grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal workers, who responded to the abuses of their employers in a series of militant strikes.
0:44.7	Their resistance arose from the rise and demise of a beef bonanza that attracted international capital.
0:51.3	Business interests approached the market with the expectation that it would
0:55.0	have the same freedom to brutally impose its will as it had exercised on native peoples and
1:00.3	recently emancipated African Americans. These assumptions contributed to a series of bitter
1:06.1	and violent range wars, which broke out from Texas to Montana and framed the appearance of labor
1:12.4	conflicts in the region. These social tensions stirred a series of political insurgencies that
1:18.6	became virtually endemic to the American West of the Gilded Age. Marque Laos explores the
1:24.8	relationship between these neglected labor conflicts, the range wars,
1:29.1	and the third-party movements. The Great Cowboy Strike subverts American mythology
1:34.6	to reveal the class abuses and inequalities that have blinded a nation to its true history and
1:41.0	nature. The Great Cowboy Strike, bullets,, Ballots, and Class Conflicts
1:46.2	in the American West by Mark A. Laos. Out now from Verso Books.
1:59.7	Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.
2:03.1	My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.
2:09.6	In the United States today, there's nothing simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible, like empire. It's a point I don't tire of making when it comes to the
2:20.8	permanent global war on terror. But as I've discussed in past interviews with Aziz Rana and
2:27.5	Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the greatest disappearing act of all has been performed just below our feet,
	...

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