LibGuides: Asian American Studies: History

Chinese Exclusion Act

[above: political cartoon from 1882; Library of Congress]

Read this for a short summary: "Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882." Encyclopedia of American Immigration. Ed. Carl L. Bankston, III. Vol. 1. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2010. 190-193. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 3 Oct. 2013.
This is a good encyclopedia article covering Asian immigration issues in the US: Wilson, Lonnie. "Asian Immigration Law." Encyclopedia of Immigration and Migration in the American West. Ed. Gordon Morris Bakken and Alexandra Kindell. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2006. 32-36. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 3 Oct. 2013.

Model Minority Myth

[img: Marcela McGreal, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]

Articles referred to in a 2021 presentation on the history of the Asian American model minority myth, from Joyce Moy, executive director of CUNY's Asian American & Asian Research. Institute:

New York Times 1966 article on Japanese Americans as a model minority
[Pattersen, William. "Success Story, Japanese-American Style: Success Story, Japanese-American Style." New York Times (1923-Current file), Jan 09, 1966, pp. 180. ProQuest.]
Time Magazine 1987 cover story on Asian American "Whiz Kids"
[Brand, David, et al. “COVER STORY The New Whiz Kids Why Asian Americans Are Doing so Well, and What It Costs Them.” TIME Magazine, vol. 130, no. 9, Aug. 1987, p. 42.] See the cover image and follow-up critique of the presentation of Asian Americans here: https://time.com/3475962/asian-american-diversity/

Other LibGuides

Japanese American Internment

A LaGuardia Community College library guide about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during 1941-1946.

Eastern Philosophy and Religion

A library resource guide to support classes such as HUP 121 - Eastern Philosophy and Religion.

Background Research

Keywords/themes to explore: gender, sexuality, women, girls, infanticide, women's rights, feminism, masculinity, India, class, caste system, diaspora, immigration, family, globalization, history and politics of different cultures.

CQ Researcher
There are tons of excellent overviews and reports here on issues relating to social movements, immigrant groups and histories. Annotated bibliographies and links are provides so this is a good starting point and a way to familiarize yourself with a topic.
Gale Virtual Reference Library
Online reference e-books that provide excellent brief overviews on issues (such as immigration law) and histories of different parts of the world, notable people, etc. Another good first place to start familiarizing yourself with the issues.
Opposing Viewpoints
Provides some great overviews on controversial issues (similar to CQ Researcher); lots of pro/con essays to help get a sense of these debates.
NEH Virtual Bookshelf - AAPI
Links to museum, archival, and historical projects and film series.
New York Times archive (1851-2009)
Full-text access to New York Times articles back the very beginning.

Books: Chinese Immigration to America

The Chinese Exclusion Act by Benjamin Railton
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 113733908X
Publication Date: 2013-06-11
"This provocative study uses the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to explore two critical strands in American Studies: policy conversations on legal and illegal immigration, which too often include no engagement with the actual histories of these categories, and social and educational conversations on diversity and multiculturalism, which tend to misconstrue multi-national diversity as a late 20th and early 21st century phenomenon...it highlights stories - such as that of Yung Wing, the first documented Chinese American immigrant, and the 120 students at his Chinese Educational Mission - that give a hopeful and instructive perspective on the challenges of today."--Amazon
Forbidden Citizens by Martin B. Gold
Call Number: KF4845 .G65 2012
ISBN: 9781587332357
Publication Date: 2012-07-01
This book assembles the complete legislative history of Congress's Chinese exclusion.
The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West by Diana L. Ahmad
Call Number: E184 .C5 A45 2007
ISBN: 0874176980
Publication Date: 2007-03-01
"The Opium Debate examines how the spread of opium-smoking fueled racism and created demands for the removal of the Chinese from American life. This study of the nineteenth-century drug-abuse crisis reveals the ways moral crusaders linked their antiopium rhetoric to already active demands for Chinese exclusion."--Amazon
Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas by Robert G. Lee (Editor); Wanni Wibulswasdi Anderson (Editor)
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 0813536103
Publication Date: 2005-05-26
"Bringing together essays by thirteen scholars from the humanities and social sciences, Displacements and Diasporas explores this genuinely transnational Asian American experience-one that crosses the Pacific and traverses the Americas from Canada to Brazil, from New York to the Caribbean."--Amazon
Impossible Subjects - Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae M. Ngai
Call Number: JV6483 .N49 2004
ISBN: 0691124299
Publication Date: 2005-08-08
"This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century."--Amazon
At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 by Erika Lee
Call Number: EBOOK [click on title to view online]
ISBN: 0807827754
Publication Date: 2003-05-19
"At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before."--Amazon
Alas! What Brought Thee Hither? by Arthur Bonner
Call Number: F128.9 .C5 B66 1997
ISBN: 0838637043
Publication Date: 1996-11-01
"This is the first iconographic history of the Chinese in New York. The history of immigrants who left scant records of their struggle to survive in a society in which the Chinese were reviled as angerous, opium soaked, and unassimilable is recounted. Includes 180 illustrations."--Amazon
Closing the Gate: race, politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act by Andrew Gyory
Call Number: Click on link to view EBOOK
ISBN: 0807824321
Publication Date: 1998-01-01
Sons of the Yellow Emperor by Lynn Pan; Paul De Angelis (Editor)
Call Number: DS732 .P36 1994
ISBN: 1568360320
Publication Date: 1994-06-15
"In this rich blend of history, biography, and travel, noted author Lynn Pan recounts why emigrants have left China; how their dispersal has been shaped and stimulated by imperialist Western powers; and how the all-male frontier groups were transformed into complex communities organized by clan, dialect, and secret society. "--Amazon

Primary Sources: Chinese Immigration to America

The Chinese in California, 1850-1925
From the Library of Congress, American Memory collection: about nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California including about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials.

Books: Asian American History

Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood by Rocío G. Davis
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780824830922
Publication Date: 2007-04-01
"By examining the artistic project of some fifty Asian North American writers who deploy their childhood narratives in the representation of the individual processes of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and national affiliation, this work provides a comprehensive overview of Asian North American autobiographies of childhood published over the last century. Importantly, it also attends to new ways of writing autobiographies, employing comics, blending verse, prose, diaries, and life writing for children, and using relational approaches to self-identification, among others."--Amazon
Sewing Women by Margaret Chin
Call Number: e-book & in print: HD6073 .C62 U5365 2005
ISBN: 0231133081
Publication Date: 2005-05-25
"Based on extensive interviews with workers and employers, Margaret M. Chin, offers a detailed and complex portrait of the work lives of Chinese and Latino garment workers."--Amazon
A Feeling of Belonging by Shirley Jennifer Lim
ISBN: 0814751946
Publication Date: 2005-12-01
Looking into Asian American female stereotypes? "...Lim highlights the cultural activities of young, predominantly unmarried Asian American women from 1930 to 1960...Lim traces the diverse ways in which these young women sought claim to cultural citizenship, exploring such topics as the nation's first Asian American sorority, Chi Alpha Delta; the cultural work of Chinese American actress Anna May Wong; Asian American youth culture and beauty pageants; and the achievement of fame of three foreign-born Asian women in the late 1950s."--Google Books
Disposable Domestics by Grace Chang; Mimi Abramovitz (Foreword by)
Call Number: HD6095 .C48 2000
ISBN: 0896086178
Publication Date: 2000-06-01
"Grace Chang's book is highly readable and relevant to anyone wanting to better understand the reality of the lives of low-wage women workers in the U.S. and the policies that maintain this workforce."--Review, Linda Delp, Labor Studies Journal 28.2 (2003).

Books: Japanese American Internment

Democratizing the Enemy by Brian Masaru Hayashi
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 0691009457
Publication Date: 2004-07-06
"Brian Hayashi reevaluates the three-year ordeal of interred Japanese Americans. Using previously undiscovered documents, he examines the forces behind the U.S. government's decision to establish internment camps. His conclusion: the motives of government officials and top military brass likely transcended the standard explanations of racism, wartime hysteria, and leadership failure. Among the other surprising factors that played into the decision, Hayashi writes, were land development in the American West and plans for the American occupation of Japan."--publisher
Farewell to Manzanar : a true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War II internment by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
Call Number: E184.J3H63 1973
ISBN: 0618216200
Publication Date: 2002
Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp--with 10,000 other Japanese Americans.
Japanese American Internment During World War II by Wendy L. Ng
Call Number: D769.8 .A6 N4 2002
ISBN: 031331375X
Publication Date: 2001-12-30
"Six interpretive essays examine key aspects of the event and provide new interpretations based on the most recent scholarship. Essays include:
- A short narrative history of the Japanese in America before World War II; The evacuation; Life within barbed wire-the assembly and relocation centers; The question of loyalty-Japanese Americans in the military and draft resisters; Legal challenges to the evacuation and internment; After the war-resettlement and redress.
A chronology of events, 26 biographical profiles of important figures, the text of 10 key primary documents--from Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment camps, to first-person accounts of the internment experience--a glossary of terms, and an annotative bibliography of recommended print sources and web sites..."--Amazon
Looking like the enemy : my story of imprisonment in Japanese-American internment camps by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald
Call Number: D769.8.A5G78 2005
ISBN: 0939165538
Publication Date: 2005
Mary Matsuda Gruenewald was 80 years old when her first book was published in April 2005. With her memoir, "Looking Like the Enemy," Gruenewald has broken her silence as a Nisei (second generation Japanese American) who was imprisoned in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
Strawberry Days by David A. Neiwert
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 140396792X
Publication Date: 2005-06-04
"Strawberry Days tells the vivid and moving tale of the creation and destruction of a Japanese immigrant community. Before World War II, Bellevue, the now-booming "edge city" on the outskirts of Seattle, was a prosperous farm town renowned for its strawberries...David Neiwert combines compelling story-telling with first-hand interviews and newly uncovered documents to weave together the history of this community and the racist schemes that prevented the immigrants from reclaiming their land after the war."--Amazon