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 Prisoner Was Taken from the Sheriff and Hanged
1874-06-22French Creek, Idaho • Lynching
In June 1874, a Chinese man accused of attacking August Berg with a hatchet was arrested after turning up wounded in Florence. The <i>Idaho Signal</i> described the assault on Berg and the suspect’s arrest. Later, <i>The Idaho World</i> reported that the prisoner was taken from Sheriff McDonald by disguised men and “suspended by the neck at the wire bridge on Salmon River.” The case became a classic frontier jail seizure in which a criminal accusation ended in mob hanging rather than trial.
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