Upcoming Events

Summer Camp 2014 - The Fun Begins!

Registration begins April 1, 2014.

Camp will be June 30th through July 24th, Monday-Thursday 8:30 a.m. -12:30 p.m.

Check back in mid-March for the full schedule.

Family Day at the Museum

World Explorations - Black Sailors and Abolition in the Age of Sail

Sunday - March 9, 2014, from 4:00-5:00 p.m. at the Chico Women's Club.

CSU, Chico Professor of English, Matthew Brown, will present his research on African Diasporic sailors and writers. 

"During the era of American slavery, free and enslaved sailors of African descent roamed widely around the Atlantic world, participating in key historical events and leaving their stamp on the communities with which they came into contact.  Sailors also penned the first six autobiographies of Diasporic Africans written in English. But even before they began carrying their stories into print, they were an essential conduit of information between ships and ports and the growing abolitionist movement. Information about the horrors of slavery and emerging forms of resistance could not have traveled so swiftly to abolitionists without the information network that I call the Sailor’s Telegraph. By examining Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, I hope to shed some light on the Sailor’s Telegraph and to make some assertions about some of the ways sailor-writers like Equiano shaped American literature." ~Matthew Brown