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
White Attackers Massacred Chinese Farmworkers
1877-03-14Lem Ranch near Chico, California • Massacre
On March 14, 1877, white attackers massacred six Chinese farmworkers at Lem Ranch near Chico, California. The <i>Sacramento Daily Union</i> called it the “recent massacre of Chinese at a camp near Chico” and said it was “placed beyond question that the murderers were white men.” A few days later, <i>The Times-Union</i> reported that the Anti Coolie Society had approved the killings “amid cries of ‘that is what we want,’” linking the massacre to organized anti-Chinese agitation. The same report noted that a prominent opponent of the Anti-Coolie Movement “received a postal card warning him that he will be killed unless he leaves the state in 30 days.” It goes on to write that “it is absolutely necessary, alike in the interest of law and order and for the good name of the State, that the scoundrels should be ferreted out and punished.”
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