At America's Gates

At America's Gates
Author: Erika Lee
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2004-01-21
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0807863130

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

Chinese American

Chinese American
Author: John Kuo Wei Tchen
Publisher: Scala Arts Publishers Incorporated
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Chinese Americans
ISBN: 9781857598964

Presents the history of the Chinese American experience, from the role of Chinese tea in the American Revolution and the rich commercial and cultural interactions between China and the U.S., to an exploration of the practices and principles developed under Chinese Exclusion and their application to other cultural groups. This concise, illustrated history considers the legacy and lessons of this period in America's history through photography, documents and historical objects. AUTHOR: John Kuo Wei Tchen is the co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America. SELLING POINTS: * Accompanies a major exhibition at the New-York Historical Society from October 2014-May 2015 * Will be of interest to the growing population of Chinese Americans and those interested in the cultural and historical connections between the two countries 50 colour illustrations

The Children of Chinatown

The Children of Chinatown
Author: Wendy Rouse
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2009-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807898589

Revealing the untold stories of a pioneer generation of young Chinese Americans, this book places the children and families of early Chinatown in the middle of efforts to combat American policies of exclusion and segregation. Wendy Jorae challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families--and particularly children--played important roles in its daily life. She explores the wide-ranging images of Chinatown's youth created by competing interests with their own agendas--from anti-immigrant depictions of Chinese children as filthy and culturally inferior to exotic and Orientalized images that catered to the tourist's ideal of Chinatown. All of these representations, Jorae notes, tended to further isolate Chinatown at a time when American-born Chinese children were attempting to define themselves as Chinese American. Facing barriers of immigration exclusion, cultural dislocation, child labor, segregated schooling, crime, and violence, Chinese American children attempted to build a world for themselves on the margins of two cultures. Their story is part of the larger American story of the struggle to overcome racism and realize the ideal of equality.

Two Faces of Exclusion

Two Faces of Exclusion
Author: Lon Kurashige
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-09-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469629445

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination. In this first book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, Kurashige argues that exclusion-era policies were more than just enactments of racism; they were also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for the twenty-first century's tightly integrated Pacific world.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
Author: John Soennichsen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2011-02-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0313379475

This in-depth examination of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 provides a chronological review of the events, ordinances, and pervasive attitudes that preceded, coincided with, and followed its enactment. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a historic act of legislation that demonstrated how the federal government of the United States once openly condoned racial discrimination. Once the Exclusion Act passed, the door was opened to further limitation of Asians in America during the late 19th century, such as the Scott Act of 1888 and the Geary Act of 1892, and increased hatred towards and violence against Chinese people based on the misguided belief they were to blame for depressed wage levels and unemployment among Caucasians. This title traces the complete evolution of the Exclusion Act, including the history of Chinese immigration to the United States, the factors that served to increase their populations here, and the subsequent efforts to limit further immigration and encourage the departure of the Chinese already in America.

The Chinese Must Go

The Chinese Must Go
Author: Beth Lew-Williams
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2018-02-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674976010

Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited violence against Chinese workers, and how that violence provoked new exclusionary policies. Locating the origins of the modern American "alien" in this violent era, she makes clear that the present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the "heathen Chinaman."

Forbidden Citizens

Forbidden Citizens
Author: Martin Gold
Publisher: The Capitol Net Inc
Total Pages: 618
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1587332353

"Described as 'one of the most vulgar forms of barbarism, ' by Rep. John Kasson (R-IA) in 1882, a series of laws passed by the United States Congress between 1879 and 1943 resulted in prohibiting the Chinese as a people from becoming U.S. citizens. Forbidden citizens recounts this long and shameful legislative history"--Page 4 of cover.

The Chinese in America

The Chinese in America
Author: Iris Chang
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2004-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101126876

A quintessiantially American story chronicling Chinese American achievement in the face of institutionalized racism by the New York Times bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking In an epic story that spans 150 years and continues to the present day, Iris Chang tells of a people’s search for a better life—the determination of the Chinese to forge an identity and a destiny in a strange land and, often against great obstacles, to find success. She chronicles the many accomplishments in America of Chinese immigrants and their descendents: building the infrastructure of their adopted country, fighting racist and exclusionary laws and anti-Asian violence, contributing to major scientific and technological advances, expanding the literary canon, and influencing the way we think about racial and ethnic groups. Interweaving political, social, economic, and cultural history, as well as the stories of individuals, Chang offers a bracing view not only of what it means to be Chinese American, but also of what it is to be American.

The Making of Asian America

The Making of Asian America
Author: Erika Lee
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2015-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476739404

"In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as ... historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"--Jacket.

Island

Island
Author: H. Mark Lai
Publisher: San Francisco Study Center
Total Pages: 190
Release: 1980
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: