Project & Thesis
About the Project
Welcome to Chinese Red Record. This archive revives a neglected chapter of American history: the white supremacist violence and legal exclusion aimed at Chinese immigrants after the Gold Rush. The first attacks appeared in California's goldfields in 1849, then moved east along wagon roads, rail lines, and river towns. By the early 1900s the violence had crossed the Mississippi River and entered a wider national regime of racial terror. Drawing on newly compiled lynching databases, digitized newspapers, and recent scholarship, this website documents how vigilante terror, expulsion campaigns, and discriminatory law worked together to drive Chinese communities from mines, rail camps, and towns.
The Archive
In the pages of this website, you will find interactive charts and maps of 75 documented incidents resulting in 196 extralegal homicides, timelines that pair major exclusion laws with surges in mob violence, and primary-source newspaper articles that preserve the voices of victims, witnesses, and resisters. The archive's goal is to make this red record of anti-Chinese violence impossible to ignore, to honor those who were lost, and to provide educators, descendants, and researchers with evidence grounded in records, newspapers, maps, and interpretation.
Why Chinese Red Record?
The title Chinese Red Record draws on Ida B. Wells's Red Record while centering the archive's own evidentiary mission: to document anti-Chinese lynchings and related lethal violence in ways that are historically grounded, searchable, and publicly legible. It names the project as both a record of racial terror and a scholarly intervention in the history of the American West.
That same framing shapes the dissertation this archive accompanies: The Chinese Red Record: Western Lynch Law and the Nationalization of Racial Terror, 1853-1915. The site follows that argument by linking individual records to broader patterns of mob violence, exclusion, expulsion, and print circulation, showing how anti-Chinese terror operated as part of a larger national history rather than a series of isolated frontier episodes.
Join the Effort
Explore the evidence, contribute your family's stories, and help us extend this record—what you see here is a starting point, not an endpoint. Together we can uncover, verify, and map new cases and perspectives, transforming collective memory and advancing justice through truth.