Petitioning for Freedom: Nebraska Women’s Fight for Legal Freedom

Date and Time

• Thursday, Mar 26, 2026  6:30pm - 8pm

Location

Details

On March 26 from 6:30-8:00pm, Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky, Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, will join us for a free evening lecture at the Nebraska History Museum to explore how women in Nebraska used habeas corpus petitions to challenge confinement, fight for custody of their children, and assert their personal freedom. Drawing from case studies in her Petitioning for Freedom database, Dr. Jagodinsky will share powerful stories of women who used the courts as a tool of resistance in a legal system that often limited their rights.

About Dr. Katrina Jajodinsky

Katrina Jagodinsky is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is author of the award-winning book, Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1945 from Yale University Press, and has recently launched an award-winning digital database called Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812-1924 that links thousands of petitioners who resisted slavery, colonialism, coverture, deportation, institutionalization, and incarceration (petitioningforfreedom.unl.edu). She is also the founder of the Digital Legal Research Lab, which trains students in legal research using digital tools at UNL.