Join American Studies for our last colloquium of the school year.

"Hobos in Heaven: Tramps, Chain Gangs, and the Rise of Mass Incarceration in the American West"

Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Associate Professor of History, UCLA

Historians have examined how the southern criminal justice system re-enslaved African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Subject to mass incarceration and forced labor, African American convicts played a key role in modernizing the southern economy. Yet, in the same years, race, modernization, and incarceration unsheathed a very different story in the American West. The talk uncovers the hidden history of the mass incarceration and forced labor of poor white men in the making of the American West between the 1870s and 1910s.

Sandwiches will be provided