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
A Chinese Suspect Was Lynched Within Hours
1858-10-19Cooks Bar, California • Lynching
On October 19, 1858, at Cook’s Bar in Sacramento County, a Chinese man accused of murdering Sarah Neal was seized by local residents and lynched within hours. The <i>Evening Star</i> reported that he was “hastily tried” and that “in a few hours” he was “hanging to a tree.” The <i>Detroit Free Press</i> summarized that he was “hung by a mob two hours after the crime.” The case shows how quickly an accusation involving a white victim could lead to immediate extralegal execution.
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