BookShared
  • MEMBER AREA    
  • The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

    (By Beth Lew-Williams)

    Book Cover Watermark PDF Icon Read Ebook
    ×
    Size 23 MB (23,082 KB)
    Format PDF
    Downloaded 612 times
    Last checked 10 Hour ago!
    Author Beth Lew-Williams
    “Book Descriptions: The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America.

    The Chinese Must Go begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. Across decades of felling trees and laying tracks in the American West, Chinese workers faced escalating racial conflict and unrest. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 and made its first attempt to bar immigrants based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment in federal border control failed to slow Chinese migration, vigilantes attempted to take the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, U.S. policymakers redoubled their efforts to keep the Chinese out, overhauling U.S. immigration law and transforming diplomatic relations with China.

    By locating the origins of the modern American alien in this violent era, Lew-Williams recasts the significance of Chinese exclusion in U.S. history. As The Chinese Must Go makes clear, anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today’s immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the “heathen Chinaman.””

    Google Drive Logo DRIVE
    Book 1

    The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics

    ★★★★★

    Mae M. Ngai

    Book 1

    Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (History of the American West)

    ★★★★★

    Elliott West

    Book 1

    Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (American Crossroads Book 59)

    ★★★★★

    George J. Sanchez

    Book 1

    Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America

    ★★★★★

    Julia Lee

    Book 1

    How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

    ★★★★★

    Daniel Immerwahr

    Book 1

    Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

    ★★★★★

    George Chauncey

    Book 1

    Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance

    ★★★★★

    Mia Bay

    Book 1

    Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

    ★★★★★

    Antonia Hylton

    Book 1

    Black Skin, White Masks

    ★★★★★

    Frantz Fanon

    Book 1

    Orientalism

    ★★★★★

    Edward W. Said

    Book 1

    The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017

    ★★★★★

    Rashid Khalidi

    Book 1

    Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

    ★★★★★

    Ira Katznelson

    Book 1

    Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

    ★★★★★

    William Cronon

    Book 1

    Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

    ★★★★★

    Kathleen Belew