Chinese Red Record
Documenting the history of anti-Chinese lynchings, riots, and massacres
in the American West (1850 – 1915)
What Is Chinese Red Record?
Chinese Red Record is a scholarly archive of anti-Chinese lynchings and related racial terror. It traces how lynchings, riots, massacres, expulsions, and exclusion worked together to drive Chinese communities from mining camps, railroad towns, river ports, and cities across the American West and beyond.
Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of documented lynchings, digitized newspaper archives, maps, and structured records, the archive reconstructs how violence spread across regions and how newspapers, law, and politics helped nationalize anti-Chinese racial terror.
The interactive maps, timelines, and charts presented here translate the dissertation's quantitative and spatial arguments into web form. Where possible, the visualizations correspond directly to the thesis, The Chinese Red Record: Western Lynch Law and the Nationalization of Racial Terror, 1853-1915.
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Featured Record
Mob Took Chinese Suspect from Jail and Lynched Him
1896-06-02Oroville, California • Lynching
On June 2, 1896, in Oroville, California, a large mob reportedly stormed the jail, removed an unnamed Chinese man who had been arrested on a murder charge, and lynched him. Surviving references indicate that he was beaten to death after being taken from custody. No linked contemporary newspaper account has yet been identified, and the victim’s name and the identities of the lynchers remain unknown.
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