News Release
Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California
News Release Date: July 14, 2022
Contact: Amanda Pollock
The National Park Service (NPS) National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program and the NPS Pacific West Cultural Resources Program are joining the Organization of American Historians (OAH) to host a public forum on July 28 at 6:30-7:30 p.m. PT to explore current scholarship surrounding the history of the Underground Railroad in California, Oregon and Washington.
Many celebrate the history of the West as one filled with innovation and personal freedoms. However, not all people experienced the West in the same way. Even though California entered the United States as a free state, the government allowed some forms of slavery, limiting African Americans' personal freedoms. Scholars today are examining freedom seekers' individual courage and the actions they took to secure their full freedom. It is critical to illuminate these stories of resistance as communities continue to struggle for freedom, justice, and equity.
The public forum will allow NPS and OAH to share preliminary outcomes from a scholar’s roundtable and provide an opportunity to discuss ongoing academic work around the history of slavery and freedom seeking in the West. Through the public forum, NPS and OAH hope to identify future partners and stakeholder groups interested in documenting, preserving, and sharing this history.
The public forum will be broadcast via a YouTube livestream. After a brief discussion from the panel, NPS will take questions from the virtual audience to present to the scholars.
The panel includes expert scholars whose work addresses the history of race, slavery, freedom seeking and migration in the West. They include:
- Albert Broussard, Professor at Texas A&M, will chair the panel. A trailblazer in researching and writing Black history, he has authored Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, American History: The Early Years to 1877 with Donald A. Ritchie, and African American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853-1963, among other works. His recent research includes considerations of African American civil rights dialogues in Hawai’i.
- Katrina Jagodinsky, Associate Professor of History and Graduate Chair at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is a legal historian who examines marginalized peoples’ engagement with 19th-century legal regimes and competing jurisdictions through the West.
- Andrés Reséndez, Professor in the Social Science Department at UC Davis, specializes in early European exploration and colonization of the Americas, the U.S-Mexico border region, and the early history of the Pacific.
- Stacey Smith, History Professor at Oregon State University, focuses on the history of the North American West, with a particular emphasis on race relations, labor, and politics during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
- Kevin A. Waite, Assistant Professor in Modern American History at Durham University in the UK, is a political historian of the 19th-century United States with a focus on slavery, imperialism, and the American West.
About the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program. Catalyzes innovation, partnerships, and scholarship that connects and shares the diverse legacy of the Underground Railroad across boundaries and generations. There are currently 715 sites, programs, and facilities that are part of the network in 39 states, plus Washington D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
About NPS Interior Regions 8, 9 10 & 12. The westernmost region of the National Park Service spans 106 degrees around the globe and includes more than 60 national park sites within the eight states of California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, portions of Arizona and Montana and the territories of Guam, American Samoa, as well as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and Freely Associated States of Micronesia.
About the Organization of American Historians. The largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history, OAH promotes excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history.
Last updated: July 14, 2022