Kevin Waite, "The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West"

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You can stand at the corner of Spring and Third in downtown Los Angeles and not know that the ground under you was owned, in the 1860s, by a woman who had walked to California behind a wagon as someone else's property and then sued her way free in a Los Angeles courtroom. Biddy Mason bought that lot, became one of the wealthiest landowners in the city, founded the First African Methodist Episcopal church in her own home, and then was mostly written out of the story of how this place was built. Waite is a historian at Durham who works on slavery in the American West - the part of the history that the national narrative keeps placing somewhere else - and he has reconstructed her life from the court records. This is the rare local-history event that is genuinely news rather than nostalgia. Free, upstairs at Vroman's, a Thursday evening in Pasadena. There is a memorial wall to her downtown on the alley that bears her name, and almost nobody who walks past it knows what it commemorates. After this you will.