Primary sources are essential in documenting our lives now and in reconstructing what we know about the past. Sources of Justice is an online scholar series where participants deeply analyze and interpret primary sources with a focus on how race and racism has informed and shaped our concept of justice in American and World History. 

Funded by the Library of Congress’s Teaching with Primary Sources program, the CHSSP network of scholars, teacher leaders, and teacher educators will inquire into questions such as:

• What or who are sources of justice? 
• How have scholars used primary sources to shape our understanding of struggles for justice over time and place? 
• What does justice or its absence feel and look like in primary sources? 

Join us online (4-5:30pm, PST) for one webinar or the entire series. Register here.

February 24: Marisa J. Fuentes, Rutgers University

Attending to Black Death: Black Women’s Bodies in the Archive 

 Dr. Fuentes will model how scholars, teachers, and students can uncover and disrupt the discursive power of the archives of slavery and black life through guided primary source analysis. Together we will probe the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department’s documents from Breonna Taylor’s murder alongside an enslaved woman’s state execution and community commemoration.

March 15: Lorena V. Márquez, University of California, Davis

Championing Local History through a Social Justice Lens

Dr. Márquez will discuss her new book: La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento (University of Arizona Press, 2020). The book examines how la gente, or everyday people, grappled with the ideologies, strategies, and political transformations of the Civil Rights era.

April 19: Kelly Lytle Hernandez, University of California, Los Angeles

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands

Dr. Lytle Hernandez will present Bad Mexicans, her latest book detailing the magonistas, migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. We will journey with Dr. Lytle Hernandez as she takes us to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them.

May 12: Tsim Schneider, University of California, Santa Cruz

Injustice and Indigenous Resilience in Colonial California

Dr. Schneider, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCSC, shares how dispossession of traditional lands, destruction of natural resources and habitat loss, disintegration of Indigenous cultures, and the demographic collapse of Native communities also illuminate critical instances of resilience during successive and compounding periods of colonial injustice.

*Register for our series here.