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
Railroad Workers Hanged a Chinese Cook at an Oregon Short Line Camp
1883-09-26Millville, Utah • Lynching
In September 1883, an unnamed Chinese cook at a railroad camp near Millville was accused of assaulting a child and was chased down by local men. <i>The San Francisco Examiner</i> said he was “caught and immediately hanged." <i>The Democratic Advocate</i> added that “the graders of the road strung him up without ceremony.” The Millville lynching repeats a pattern in which an accusation of the “outraging” (a 19th-century euphemism for sexual assault) of a white woman or child served as a pretext for a summary execution. Railroad construction sites became theatres for racial terror broadcast across the United States through a network of white newspapers. The killing shows how railroad camps could become sites of instant mob justice in the anti-Chinese West.
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