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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Access structured data used across the archive.
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Featured Record
A Citizens’ Court Voted 19 to 18 to Hang a Chinese Man
1871-10-31Henderson Gulch, Montana • Lynching
In October 1871, a Chinese man accused of stealing several hundred dollars from a store in Henderson Gulch was tried before a self-appointed “citizens’ court” and condemned by a vote of 19 to 18. <i>The Anaconda Recorder and New Northwest</i> reported that the sentence was then “carried into effect,” but also argued that those responsible should be “held to strict accountability before the courts, which are now adequate to a strict enforcement of the laws, and summary executions must be stopped.” The case is a vivid example of pseudo-legal frontier vigilantism masquerading as justice.
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