Transience, Labor, and Nature: Itinerant Workers in the American West
Abstrak
AbstractThis article focuses on the tens of thousands of itinerant workers, also known as tramps or hoboes, who provided the primary labor force for the natural resource extraction industries of the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Itinerant workers' visceral encounters with nature differed from the experiences of most urban residents in this era of city growth and related anxiety about Americans' loss of contact with the natural world. This article argues that some hoboes embraced time spent in “wild” nature as an escape from work, and they consciously asserted their ability to appreciate nature in the face of claims that such appreciation was class-specific. As workers and as travelers, itinerant laborers experienced and knew nature in ways that reflected both their distinct circumstances as mobile industrial wage workers and the cultural context of a national obsession with nonhuman nature.
Penulis (1)
Joanna Dyl
Akses Cepat
- Tahun Terbit
- 2014
- Bahasa
- en
- Total Sitasi
- 1×
- Sumber Database
- CrossRef
- DOI
- 10.1017/s0147547913000483
- Akses
- Open Access ✓