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.

Read the full thesis framing in About → Project & Thesis.

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Map showing location of El Paso, Texas

Chinese Man Reported Lynched in Confused Borderland Reports

1911-07-00

El Paso, Texas • Lynching

In July 1911, Honolulu newspapers reported that a Chinese man had been lynched in El Paso and that forty Chinese men were jailed on suspicion. But <i>The Montgomery Advertiser</i> placed the killing across the border in Juárez, where a Chinese man was found hanging from a tree, and twenty Chinese men were arrested. The surviving reports are sparse and contradictory, but they point to a rare late lynching report from the El Paso–Juárez borderlands.

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