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
The “Tacoma Method” Drove Chinese Residents Out and Left Two Men Dead
1885-11-01Tacoma, Washington • Expulsion
In November 1885, Tacoma vigilantes and city leaders forced the Chinese residents of Tacoma from their homes in what contemporaries called the “Tacoma method.” <i>The Oregonian</i> said a mob of 500 broke into houses, marched the Chinese “some eight miles through a rain storm,” kept them under guard at Lake View, and burned their homes. During the forced march, two sick men “died from the exposure.” A speech reprinted in <i>The Anaconda Recorder and New Northwest</i> condemned the expulsion as unlawful and said “two hundred human beings were driven out of Tacoma like dogs.” This, according to the same newspapers, was the "‘Tacoma method,’ without coloring or exaggeration.” The same editorial rejected the claim that the Chinese left Tacoma voluntarily.
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