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Jean Pfaelzer: California, A Slave State

April 29 @ 5:00 pm - 6:15 pm PDT

Sponsored by The Book Club of California

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—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.

By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers.

A virtual presentation by Jean Pfaelzer, author and professor emerita of English and American Studies, University of Delaware


Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom

Details

Date:
April 29
Time:
5:00 pm - 6:15 pm PDT
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