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
Chinese Witness Was Lynched in the Honomu Murder Case
1889-01-00Honomu, Hawaii • Lynching
In January 1889, the principal Chinese witness in the Honomu murder case was attacked near the plantation and died from his injuries. <i>The Hawaiian Gazette</i> reported that he was “lynched by his countrymen” and that police were pursuing suspects in what the paper called another case of “Highbinders’ law.” The killing appears to have been retaliation against a witness rather than a public spectacle lynching.
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