The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law made exceptions for merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major US law ever implemented to prevent all members of a specific national group from immigrating to the United States, and therefore helped shape twentieth-century race-based immigration policy.
Asian Americans are Americans with ancestry from the continent of Asia.
Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.
The Geary Act was a United States law that extended the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by adding onerous new requirements. It was written by California Representative Thomas J. Geary and was passed by Congress on May 5, 1892. The law required all Chinese residents of the United States to carry a resident permit, a sort of internal passport. Failure to carry the permit at all times was punishable by deportation or a year of hard labor. In addition, Chinese were not allowed to bear witness in court, and could not receive bail in habeas corpus proceedings.
Bhagat Singh Thind was an Indian diaspora writer and lecturer on spirituality who served in the United States Army during World War I and was involved in a Supreme Court case over the right of Indian people to obtain United States citizenship. He was among a group of men of Indian ancestry who attempted to claim he was White and naturalize under federal naturalization law.
Asian immigration to the United States refers to immigration to the United States from part of the continent of Asia, which includes East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Asian-origin populations have historically been in the territory that would eventually become the United States since the 16th century. The first major wave of Asian immigration occurred in the late 19th century, primarily in Hawaii and the West Coast. Asian Americans experienced exclusion, and limitations to immigration, by the United States law between 1875 and 1965, and were largely prohibited from naturalization until the 1940s. Since the elimination of Asian exclusion laws and the reform of the immigration system in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, there has been a large increase in the number of immigrants to the United States from Asia.
The Bellingham riots occurred on September 4, 1907, in Bellingham, Washington, United States. A mob of 400–500 white men, predominantly members of the Asiatic Exclusion League, with intentions to exclude Indian immigrants from the work force of the local lumber mills, attacked the homes of the South Asian Indians. The Indians were mostly Sikhs but were labelled as Hindus by much of the media of the day.
Asian American history is the history of ethnic and racial groups in the United States who are of Asian descent. The term "Asian American" was an idea invented in the 1960s to bring together Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans for strategic political purposes. Soon other groups of Asian origin, such as Korean, Indian, and Vietnamese Americans were added. For example, while many Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants arrived as unskilled workers in significant numbers from 1850 to 1905 and largely settled in Hawaii and California, many Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong Americans arrived in the United States as refugees following the Vietnam War. These separate histories have often been overlooked in conventional frameworks of Asian American history.
Ayad Akhtar is an American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He has received numerous accolades including the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as nominations for two Tony Awards.
The Pacific Coast race riots were a series of riots which occurred in the United States and Canada in 1907. The violent riots resulted from growing anti-Asian sentiment among White populations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rioting occurred in San Francisco, Bellingham, and Vancouver. Anti-Asian rioters in Bellingham focused mainly on several-hundred Sikh workers recently immigrated from India. Chinese immigrants were attacked in Vancouver and Japanese workers were mainly targeted in San Francisco.
The Vancouver riots occurred September 7–9, 1907, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. At about the same time there were similar anti-Asian riots in Bellingham, Washington, San Francisco, and other West Coast cities. They were not coordinated but instead reflected common underlying anti-immigration attitudes. Agitation for direct action was led by labour unions and small business. Damage to Asian-owned property was extensive.
Marlon James is a Jamaican writer. He is the author of five novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won him the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022).
The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940 is a 2010 book by Robert Chao Romero, published by the University of Arizona Press, about the history of Chinese immigration to Mexico. This is the first English-language monograph written about Chinese immigration to Mexico. Anju Reejhsinghani of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point described it as "a social history of the small but influential Chinese merchant and laboring community in northern Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century." Erika Lee of the University of Minnesota stated that because much of the existing literature on Asian immigration to North and South America discusses the United States, this book "fills an enormous historiographical gap."
Erika Lee is a historian and author. She is currently the inaugural Bae Family Professor of History at Harvard University, a position she began in July 2023. In addition, she is still active as an award-winning author, known for her non-fiction work upon the subjects of immigration and Asian American history in America. Previously, she was the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.
May-lee Chai is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. She is also currently a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Asian American activism broadly refers to the political movements and social justice activities involving Asian Americans. Since the first wave of Asian immigration to the United States, Asians have been actively engaged in social and political organizing. The early Asian American activism was mainly organized in response to the anti-Asian racism and Asian exclusion laws in the late-nineteenth century, but during this period, there was no sense of collective Asian American identity. Different ethnic groups organized in their own ways to address the discrimination and exclusion laws separately. It was not until the 1960s when the collective identity was developed from the civil rights movements and different Asian ethnic groups started to come together to fight against anti-Asian racism as a whole.
Erika L. Sánchez is an American poet and writer. She is the author of poetry collection Lessons on Expulsion, a young adult novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir. She was a professor at DePaul University.
Chia Youyee Vang is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research and writing deals with the Hmong diaspora, other Southeast Asian diasporas and refugees and on community-building efforts among Hmong people in the United States.
East Asia–United States relations covers American relations with the region as a whole, as well as summaries of relations with China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and smaller places. It includes diplomatic, military, economic, social and cultural ties. The emphasis is on historical developments.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a 2020 debut novel by American author C Pam Zhang. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Adult Fiction. The book was published by Riverhead Books in North America and by Virago Press in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.
