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Date of Graduation
5-14-2026
Semester of Graduation
Spring
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Department of History
First Advisor
Steven Reich
Second Advisor
Fawn-Amber Montoya
Third Advisor
Yongguang Hu
Abstract
Between the California Gold Rush and the First World War, Chinese immigrants were subjected to a systematic regime of extralegal racial violence marked by lynchings, riots, massacres, and forced expulsions. Using a newly compiled dataset of anti-Chinese lynchings and related lethal incidents, this thesis reconstructs a “red record” of that violence and traces its spread from California and the Pacific Coast to the Mississippi Delta. In doing so, it expands the geography of what Ida B. Wells called “OUR country’s national crime” in “Lynch Law in America” (1900). These extralegal killings formed part of a Western anti-Chinese exclusionist regime that used mob violence to drive Chinese immigrants from economic and community life. Frontier vigilantism supplied a culturally legitimate script of punishment that mobs adapted to seize mining claims, eliminate labor competition, and clear Chinese residents from towns, camps, and workplaces. Drawing on large digital archives of mostly white-owned newspapers, the thesis also shows how anti-Chinese violence and ideology circulated nationally. It reframes the American West as foundational to the nationalization of racial terror in the United States and argues that anti-Chinese violence helped bridge frontier vigilantism and the later regime of anti-Black lynching in the Jim Crow South, where a similar ritualized script enforced subordination rather than exclusion.
