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
Cum Sow Was Killed, Probably by White Men
1858-04-17Columbia, California • Lynching
On May 17, 1858, in Columbia, California, a Chinese man named Cum Sow was killed under circumstances that were never fully explained. A later local history recorded simply that Cum Sow, a “Chinaman,” was “killed in Columbia; probably by white men.” The brief notice preserves one of the few known names of a Chinese victim from the early Gold Rush years.</br>-----</br>From Lang, Herbert O. <i>A History of Tuolumne County, California: Compiled from the Most Authentic Records.</i> San Francisco: B.F. Alley, 1882. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/historyoftuolumn00lang/page/274/mode/2up.
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