Book reading: “California, a Slave State” by Jean Pfealzer

(Zoom event)
To register:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lfjhVxEIQhuuYq2UpuP_Jw#/registration

California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.
Jean Pfaelzer’s new book California, a Slave State (Yale University Press, June 2023) upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. The book exposes how California’s appetite for slavery persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs in sweatshops and marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers. Pfaelzer shares her unyielding research and vivid interviews in this talk.

Jean Pfaelzer is a life-long Californian, public historian, author, and professor. She currently teaches American studies at the University of Delaware. Her books include Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, listed on the NYT 100 Notable Books of the Year, 2007; Rebecca Harding Davis: Origins of Social Realism; and The Utopian Novel in America. Pfaelzer divides her time between Washington, DC and her family cabin in Humboldt County.