Overview

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. Slavery shreds California's utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America's uneasy paths to freedom.

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Jean Pfaelzer is a public historian, commentator, and professor of American studies at the University of Delaware. Her books include Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans; Rebecca Harding Davis: Origins of Social Realism; and The Utopian Novel in America. She lives in Washington, DC. Ewan Chung was born in Washington DC and raised in Virginia. His film credits include Awakened by Marvin Willson, Orenthal: The Musical by Jeff Rosenberg, Morning, and Undiscovered. His many TV credits include David E. Kelley's medical drama Monday Mornings, Bones, Torchwood, Two and a Half Men, Boston Legal, Chuck, Eli Stone, Heroes, How I Met Your Mother, The Unit, Stephen King's Desperation, Las Vegas, Invasion, and Spike Lee's Sucker Free City. Ewan majored in the French language at the University of Virginia, is also fluent in Mandarin, and has a working knowledge of German, Dutch, and Spanish.

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