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
Mob Lynched Chinese Cook After Assault Allegation
1883-10-03Weatherby, Oregon • Lynching
On October 3, 1883, near Weatherby, Oregon, an unnamed Chinese cook employed by the Jessop family was lynched after being accused of assaulting a seven-year-old girl. <i>The Sacramento Union</i> described a pursuit in which excited men set fire to the woods: “The flames drove the Celestial out, when he was captured. A rope was procured, and the Chinaman was lynched. The whole affair did not occupy twenty minutes. The Sheriff was sent for after the Celestial was dead, but deemed it prudent to make no arrests. The action of the citizens is generally sanctioned.” This lynching follows the familiar script in which the mob acts under the pretext of performing justice, local law enforcement did not provide protection, the Chinese man was hanged, and the perpetrators were not punished.
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