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.
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Open charts, maps, timelines, and comparative views.
Access structured data used across the archive.
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Featured Record
Chinese Laborer Found Hanging Near Briggs’ Ranch
1881-03-04Davis, California • Lynching
On March 4, 1881, a Chinese laborer was found hanging from a tree near Briggs’ ranch outside Davisville, California. The <i>Reno Gazette-Journal</i> reported that there were “no particulars as to the cause." The <i>Napa County Recorder</i> later said that a coroner’s jury found death by strangulation but could not determine whether “the hanging was done by himself or others.” The case remains an ambiguous but suspicious hanging death.
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