If You Go
Date: June 9, 2021
Time: 12:00PM
Where: Virtual

Natalia Molina is a historian who examines the interconnectedness of racial and ethnic communities through her concept of “racial scripts.” Author of How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940.

Historians Imagine is a monthly webinar devoted to this dimension of the craft. Patty Limerick and Matthew Jacobson talk with path-breaking historians about the inventiveness and vision of their work, and about the more mysterious aspects of their practices—their imaginative spark and the virtues that lie beyond rigor and out of reach of your typical “how to” manual. These conversations will appeal to professional historians, to be sure, and might offer liberation from the academy’s constraints and the disciplining demands of convention. But they will equally engage anyone who is interested in how new stories are made from old materials, and how great storytellers and historical sleuths think to do what they do.

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board at CU Boulder’s Center of the American West. Matthew Frye Jacobson is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale. He is the author of seven books on race, politics, and culture in the United States.

I don’t find anything particularly magical about my creation process. I think, share, write, share, re-write, share, re-write, share and eventually it feels done. What some people see as magic and creativity I see as writing before I’m ready, getting feedback and rewriting

 Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, University of California Press, 2014  Theory, Method, and Practice


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