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
Anti-Chinese Riot Produced a Reported Lynching
1889-03-12Milwaukee, Wisconsin • Possible lynching
In March 1889, anti-Chinese violence in Milwaukee escalated from courtroom threats to citywide attacks on Chinese laundries and residents. <i>The Pittsburg Post</i> and <i>The Great Falls Leader</i> described crowds shouting “Kill them” and officers barely preventing the lynching of Chinese laundrymen. The <i>Ashland Weekly News</i> later claimed that “early this morning a Chinaman was hanged by a mob at Twenty-Seventh and Chesnut streets.” Because the surviving newspaper accounts conflict between attempted and completed lynching, this remains a possible lynching in the archive.
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