Chad E. Pearson is a labor historian and writer whose work focuses on ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this episode we discuss his latest book, Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2022), which explores how elite capitalists evolved new strategies of violence and repression during the Second Industrial Revolution, employing extralegal terror—from book burning and blacklists to kidnappings, arson, and murder—as a means of securing their power over a rising population of wage workers.
