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
A Mob Lynched Two Chinese Men at Happy Camp
1874-06-04Happy Camp, California • Lynching
On June 4, 1874, a mob at Happy Camp in Del Norte County lynched two unnamed Chinese men accused of murder. The surviving newspaper reports are extremely brief: <i>Ottawa Daily Citizen</i> stated that “Two Chinaman were lynched yesterday by a mob at Happy Camp.” <i>The Altoona Tribune</i> added that the men had confessed to killing O’Mera, a white man. These terse notices preserve the fact of a double lynching but reveal almost nothing about the victims, the mob, or any official response.
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