A Machine to Move Ocean & Earth: A Discussion with James Tejani
Friday, April 4, 2025
12:00 – 1:00pm PST
Join ICW for a discussion with James Tejani about his new work, A Machine to Move Ocean & Earth. This groundbreaking work dives into the history of the Los Angeles Port, charting the port’s rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself. Interweaving the natural history of San Pedro into this all-too-human history, Dr. Tejani will share with us how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. In Discussion With Elizabeth Logan.
Free with Pre-Registration (Click Here)
James Tejani is associate professor at California State University in San Luis Obispo. After growing up in Long Beach, he studied at the University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University. His writings have appeared in Western Historical Quarterly, Southern California Quarterly, Dispatches Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. His debut book A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth was published by W. W. Norton in July 2024.
Freedom and Unfreedom in the American West
Thursday, April 24, 2025
12:00 – 1:00pm PST
Join ICW for a conversation between Professors Alice Baumgartner and Katria Jagodinsky, moderated by Prof. Julian Lim, about their current research projects on the legal ramifications of freedom and unfreedom in the American West from the late 19th into the early 20th centuries.
Free with Pre-Registration (Click Here)
Featuring:
Alice Baumgartner is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California. 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 Associate Professor of History at University of Nebraska Lincoln and 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. Dr. 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: https://petitioningforfreedom.unl.edu/
Moderated by Julian Lim is the Arthur Eisenberg and Susan Engel Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Lim’s work explores connections between Asian, Latinx, African American, and Indigenous histories and how laws shape notions of belonging within the U.S. 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.
Image credit: Petitioning for Freedom Database, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
Western Edition Season 4 Podcast
More than 50 million viewers begin each new year looking to Pasadena, tuning into the Rose Parade to see flower and seed-coated floats cruise slowly down Colorado Boulevard. But to nearly 1450,000 of those viewers, the “City of Roses” is home, a complex suburb of downtown Los Angeles with a deep history. Pasadena has played a greater role in American and Pacific histories than most of its residents even know.
This new season of Western Edition digs deep into the “Crown City” of the San Gabriel Valley with six little-known Pasadena stories, from Simons brickyard to Vroman’s bookstore, St. Barnabas church to the Shoya House at The Huntington. It also considers Pasadenans from the past, from John Brown’s children to John Birch’s followers.