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Title details for California, a Slave State by Jean Pfaelzer - Available

California, a Slave State

by Jean Pfaelzer
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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
 
âA searing survey of â250 years of human bondageâ in what is now the state of California. . . . Readers will be outraged.ââPublishers Weekly
 
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 Nativesâthe first slaves transported into Californiaâand launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated Californiaâs 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 Californiaâs utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines Americaâs uneasy paths to freedom.

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Languages

  • English