ICW Presents: Freedom and Unfreedom in the American West

The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West hosts a conversation between Professors Alice Baumgartner and Katrina Jagodinsky about the legal ramifications of freedom and unfreedom in the American West from the late 19th to the early 20th century, with Professor Julian Lim as the moderator.

About the Speakers

Alice Baumgartner is an associate professor of history at USC. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and an M.Phil. in Latin American studies from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Her first book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to Civil War, was selected as an editor’s choice by the New York Times Book Review and as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in History.

Katrina Jagodinsky is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the founder of the Digital Legal Research Lab, a hub for critical legal research applying digital tools to chronicle and measure marginalized people’s use of the law in the United States. Jagodinsky recently launched Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812–1924, a database of legal cases featuring the efforts of petitioners to challenge their wrongful confinement and coercive detention.

Julian Lim is the Arthur Eisenberg and Susan Engel Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Lim’s work explores connections among Asian, Latinx, African American, and Indigenous histories and how laws shape notions of belonging within the United States and across national boundaries. Lim’s first book, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, examined the history of diverse immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the development of immigration policy and law on both sides of the border.