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
Chinese Miners Lynched “New York Charley” for the Murder of G. W. Mardis
1880-09-13Nevada • Lynching
In September 1880, a Chinese man known as “New York Charley” was accused of murdering G. W. Mardis in Elko County, Nevada. The <i>Morning Appeal</i> reported that his six-toed footprint matched the track left at the scene, that he confessed, and that he was then “lynched by his countrymen.” The <i>Reno Gazette-Journal</i> said he was brought back from Mountain City to the scene of the crime, and then lynched by a "party of his countrymen." The case stands out because the lynching was carried out by fellow Chinese miners rather than by a white mob. By 1880, the climate of “the Chinese must go!” was growing, and even Chinese immigrants could adopt lynching as a form of communal law enforcement.
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