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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Browse lynching records by date, place, and event details.
Read article images, transcriptions, and source citations.
Open charts, maps, timelines, and comparative views.
Access structured data used across the archive.
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Featured Record
Judge Knowles Recalled an Unpunished Lynching
1868-07-04Henderson Gulch, Montana • Possible lynching
A 1904 article in <i>The Anaconda Standard</i> recalled that a Chinese man was lynched by a mob at Henderson Gulch in 1868. Judge William W. Knowles said he had tried to secure indictments when he was on the territorial supreme bench, but was unsuccessful. This case shows that even when an official tries to bring justice for a Chinese victim, the white community bands together to protect the perpetrators from meaningful punishment. Because the surviving evidence is retrospective and sparse, the case requires additional evidence.
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