According to Professor Jean Pfaelzer, the very first colonizers who crossed the border of the Golden State were and still are powered by slavery—a piece of American history that many still try to bury.
Though unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery; its appetite for unfree bodies and unpaid labor persists today in the global traffic in human beings who end up sold into the sex trade or trapped in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows.
Join us when public historian, commentator, and professor of American studies at the University of Delaware, Jean Pfaelzer shares how this once-shrouded history spans three centuries of diverse types of slavery and slave revolts on this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large.