Pfaelzer California, A Slave State

California, A Slave State

(Yale University Press, 2023)

Winner of the 2023 Heyday History Award!

In American lore, California is Eden, a land of unending sunshine, long coastlines, and rich harvests — a prize for a country hellbent on fulfilling the promise of manifest destiny. But this is not the full story…

Jean Pfaelzer’s groundbreaking book reveals that the Golden State was — and still is — powered by slavery.

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Please consider ordering through your local independent bookstore! A few of Jean’s favorites are Politics and Prose, Powell’s Books, City Lights & Green Apple Books.

“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 and used it to become the most prosperous state in the union.”

— Los Angeles Times

A History of Slavery and Slave Revolts

Jean Pfaelzer’s newest book reveals the full and untold history of California as a slave state. Spanning three centuries of human bondage and slave resistance, it depicts crucial and often overlooked forms of slavery and slave revolts in the Golden State.

  • Native Americans kidnapped and enslaved by Spanish invaders to build a chain of Catholic missions.

  • Alaska Natives, the first enslaved people transported into California, shipped by Russians to kill sea otters and launch a Pacific slave triangle—Alaska, California, and China.

  • Enslaved Black plantation laborers carried across the plains for the Gold Rush.

  • The first prisoners at San Quentin who birthed California’s carceral state and shaped modern convict labor. 

  • Children at Indian boarding schools forced to work in the new orange groves, cattle ranches, and hotels.

  • Kidnapped Chinese girls, sold in caged brothels in San Francisco, further extending California’s global trade in human trafficking. 

  • Today, men, women, and children are lured from overseas by promises of jobs, only to end up locked in sweatshops or sold as sex workers.

Yet through it all, Jean shows that resistance and rebellion undermined every iteration of human bondage in California’s history.

Through her painstaking archival work and rich storytelling, Jean Pfaelzer rewrites our understanding of race in the West and redefines America’s uneasy paths to freedom. 

Praise for California, A Slave State

  • Featured in Publisher's Weekly!

    “A searing survey of ‘250 years of human bondage’ in what is now the state of California. . . . Pfaelzer traces the practices of today’s prison system, such as the leasing of convicts to private employers as forced labor, back to the various slave trades that occurred in California, and makes an irrefutable case that unpaid labor was a major engine of the state’s economic growth. Readers will be outraged.”

  • Featured in the Los Angeles Times!

    “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 and used it to become the most prosperous state in the union.”

    READ THE FULL REVIEW

  • “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

  • "Pfaelzer’s extensive research and woven storytelling make the book an invaluable resource for scholars, educators and anyone newly interested in gaining a deeper understanding of California’s complex past. California, A Slave State is a poignant reminder that California’s history as a slave state remains a living legacy and that the struggle for freedom is ongoing."

    Cintia Quesada, Department of Sociology, California State University, Fresno, CA

  • “[Jean Pfaelzer’s] book should raise new questions for reparations commissions, state and local.”

    Thomas D. Elias, Napa Valley Register

  • Featured in Alta Online, "11 New Books for June"

    “This wide-ranging history encompasses the Spanish conquest of Indigenous peoples and the trafficking of sex workers today, looking underneath the veneer of sunshine to reveal the dark undercurrents that have long powered California’s economy.”goes here

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California, A Slave State

California was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a “free state” that would not “tolerate slavery,” yet its appetite for unfree bodies and unpaid labor persisted and endures today in the global traffic in human beings. Through unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California has continued to prosper from enslaved labor in every sector, from agriculture and sweat shops to the sex trade and remote marijuana farms.

Listen to Jean discuss her newest book on KQED

— “How California Became a Slave State” —

Listen now!