Overview

The untold history of slavery and resistance in California, from the Spanish missions, indentured Native American ranch hands, Indian boarding schools, Black miners, kidnapped Chinese prostitutes, and convict laborers to victims of modern trafficking   The dark and buried history of California as a slave state is seldom acknowledged. Yet the state owes its origins 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. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls, displayed in cages, served in brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied unfree child workers. In this groundbreaking book, Jean Pfaelzer upends the North-South dichotomy in how we understand American slavery by looking west to California. 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 and trapped in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers.   Slavery shreds the state’s utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America’s uneasy paths to freedom.

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9780300211641

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Reviews

“A powerful history of California’s varied systems of servitude, this book extends across three centuries, exploring bondage, resistance, and how servitude has shaped life in the golden state.”—Benjamin Madley, author of An American Genocide “California has long asserted a proud legacy as a ‘free state.’ Jean Pfaelzer exposes huge rifts in that glossy narrative, including contemporary practices. A stunning aggregation of evidence through extraordinary research.”—Franklin Odo, Amherst College “This capacious book excavates California’s brutal history of multi-racial bondage. After reading it, we will never see the Golden State’s celebrated diversity—or the stories the nation tells itself about its racial past—in the same way.”—P. Gabrielle Foreman, The Colored Conventions Project “Through prolific storytelling using a range of human characters, Jean Pfaelzer takes us through the long California story of slavery and unfreedom in its many forms, offering a powerful revision of the state’s history.”—Philip Deloria, author of Playing Indian

“A devastatingly detailed, urgent, and somewhat regretful confirmation of an inconvenient truth: Far from being the place where everyone got an equal chance, California embraced slavery from the outset. . . . That boosterish tale of California’s endless possibility turns out to have been built with sweat, oppression, coercion, and genocide. It was precisely California’s openness, Pfaelzer posits, that allowed greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy to run amok, and it is this bitter irony—not the orange groves or Mediterranean climate—that makes us (that fraught word) exceptional.”—Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times “A historian explains how California ‘welcomed, honed and legalized’ human bondage for 250 years, from the legalized enslavement of Native Americans to forced labor in today’s prisons.”—New York Times Book Review Honored with the Heyday History Award, sponsored by Heyday Books   “A powerful history of California’s varied systems of servitude, this book extends across three centuries, exploring bondage, resistance, and how servitude has shaped life in the golden state.”—Benjamin Madley, author of An American Genocide “California has long asserted a proud legacy as a ‘free state.’ Jean Pfaelzer exposes huge rifts in that glossy narrative, including contemporary practices. A stunning aggregation of evidence through extraordinary research.”—Franklin Odo, Amherst College “This capacious book excavates California’s brutal history of multi-racial bondage. After reading it, we will never see the Golden State’s celebrated diversity—or the stories the nation tells itself about its racial past—in the same way.”—P. Gabrielle Foreman, The Colored Conventions Project “Through prolific storytelling using a range of human characters, Jean Pfaelzer takes us through the long California story of slavery and unfreedom in its many forms, offering a powerful revision of the state’s history.”—Philip Deloria, author of Playing Indian

A powerful history of California's varied systems of servitude, this book extends across three centuries, exploring bondage, resistance, and how servitude has shaped life in the golden state. -Benjamin Madley, author of An American Genocide California has long asserted a proud legacy as a 'free state.' Jean Pfaelzer exposes huge rifts in that glossy narrative, including contemporary practices. A stunning aggregation of evidence through extraordinary research. -Franklin Odo, Amherst College This capacious book excavates California's brutal history of multi-racial bondage. After reading it, we will never see the Golden State's celebrated diversity-or the stories the nation tells itself about its racial past-in the same way. -P. Gabrielle Foreman, The Colored Conventions Project Through prolific storytelling using a range of human characters, Jean Pfaelzer takes us through the long California story of slavery and unfreedom in its many forms, offering a powerful revision of the state's history. -Philip Deloria, author of Playing Indian

Author Information

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.

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