Explore Jean’s Books
Jean Pfaelzer writes multi-racial stories unearthed from historical archives. Her work has won acclaim and awards around the world. Her newest book is the much-anticipated California, A Slave State.
Winner of the 2023 Heyday History Award!
A History of Slavery and Slave Revolts
California, A Slave State is the untold history of slavery, slave revolts, 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.
“A searing survey of ‘250 years of human bondage’ in what is now the state of California. . . . Readers will be outraged.”—Publishers Weekly
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build a chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Enslaved African Americans 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 the state’s new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.
By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South pact and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. Through 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 — men, women, and children who are instead 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.
(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.)
Praise for California, A Slave State
Named one of the “100 Notable Books of the Year” by the New York Times and recently optioned for a 4-part television series!
The brutal and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking – and virtually unexplored – chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation’s past. Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians purged over three hundred communities of thousands of Chinese residents – and how the victims bravely fought back.
“Riveting...It rescues for history the hitherto forgotten story of a sophisticated and tenacious Chinese resistance movement."
— San Francisco Chronicle
Awarded the Asian Pacific American Literature Award for Best Non-Fiction in 2007, Driven Out features riveting characters, both heroic and villainous, Asian and white. This deeply resonant and eye-opening work documents a significant and disturbing episode in American history. It has been translated for international audiences, including a Mandarin edition.
Praise for Driven Out
Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism
Parlor Radical fills a large void in nineteenth-century American literary history and makes a major contribution to reexamining the intersections of literary culture and social problems in the post-war period…. It is a pleasure to read a tale told in a real person's voice. ~ Paul Lauter, Smith Professor of Literature at Trinity College
In Parlor Radical, Jean Pfaelzer studies the work of a prominent author of radical social fiction during the second half of the 19th century — Rebecca Harding Davis. Parlor Radical shows how Harding Davis fashioned contemporary narrative forms to arouse sympathy for working women, slaves, and prostitutes. It details the context of her fiction in the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century.
Pfaelzer's superb cultural analysis . . . promises to stimulate a reconceptualization of both 19th-century women's writing and the development of literary realism. ~ Carolyn L. Karcher, Temple University
The Utopian Novel in America, 1886–1896: The Politics of Form
"The Utopian Novel is without doubt an enlightening and perceptive work which deserves a place in every English Studies library." ~ Anglo-American Studies
In the late 1800s, Americans flocked to cities. Immigration, slums, and unemployment burgeoned, and America's role in foreign affairs grew. This period also spawned a number of fictional glimpses into the future. After the publication of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888, there was an outpouring of utopian fantasies, many of which promoted socialism, while others presented refined versions of capitalism. Jean Pfaelzer's study traces the impact of the utopian novel on American politics and the narrative structures of these sentimental romances. She discusses progressive, pastoral, feminist, and apocalyptic utopias, as well as the genre's parodic counterpart, the dystopia.
“Pfaelzer's approach, the recognition of the crucial importance of the literary quality of utopian fiction (and perhaps other didactic literature), seems to me indispensible to any full understanding of a considerable body of American writing. . . . an original and valuable contribution.” ~ Modern Fiction Studies
A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader: Life in the Iron-mills, Selected Fiction, & Essays
"Jean Pfaelzer gives us not just a historically important collection; she gives us an absorbing book. Davis summons an intensity of feeling traditionally associated with 'sentimentalism' to sound the earliest notes of 'realism' in our national letters. We do not expect such writing from the pen of a nineteenth-century woman. Today's readers will be astonished." ~ Jean Fagan Yellin, Pace University
Despite the need to support her husband, an impoverished young lawyer, and despite her editors’ pressures to exclude "unfeminine" social realities from her work, Rebecca Harding Davis refused to be silent about, as she put it, the "signification [of the] voices of the world." In both fiction and nonfiction, Davis attacked slavery, prostitution, laws that banned divorce, the Spanish-American War, the colonization of Africa, the plight of the rural South, northern racism, environmental pollution, and degraded work conditions generated by the rise of heavy industry.
Jean Pfaelzer integrates cultural, historical, and psychological approaches through penetrating readings of Davis's work. She emphasizes how Davis's fictional embrace of the “commonplace” was instrumental in the demise of American romanticism and in eroding the repressive cultural expectations for women.
Mizora: An 1880s Radical Feminist Utopia
"The Utopian Novel is without doubt an enlightening and perceptive work which deserves a place in every English Studies library." ~ Anglo-American Studies
This new edition of Mizora about an 1880s tale of a radical feminist utopia includes an extensive introduction — a “groundbreaking scholarly treatment of the work” — that provides a critical apparatus to appropriately place Mizora and author Mary E. Bradley Lane in the cultural and historical context of the nineteenth century. A precursor to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Mizora is the first all-female and proto-lesbian utopian novel in American literature.