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 Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s […]

Join Larry Tye, the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, in conversation with acclaimed interviewer and radio host Dr. Michael Krasny on Tye's new book, The Jazzmen. The Jazzmen is a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and […]

Join author and historian Sandra Bonura in conversation online on her new book, The Sugar King of California: The Life of Claus Spreckels. The Sugar King of California is the astonishingly intimate story of one of the most controversial entrepreneurs of the 19th century - a rule-breaking visionary who through his sugar empire became one of […]

Letterform Archive’s fifth gallery exhibition, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.: Citizen Printer, explores the bold language, graphic typography, and colorful layering in a wide variety of printed artifacts such as broadsides, maps, church fans, handbills and oversized posters produced throughout his career. Encompassing the evolving trajectory of Black liberation in the United States, from growing up in the ’60s during the […]