Key Insights in Brief

Between the California Gold Rush and the First World War, Chinese immigrants were subjected to a coordinated regime of racial terror—lynchings, riots, expulsions, and legal exclusion. This project argues that those acts were not isolated episodes of frontier disorder, but part of a broader Western system of racial enforcement aimed at removal and exclusion.

Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of anti-Chinese lynchings, linked newspaper evidence, and spatial analysis, the project traces how violence spread across the American West and into the Mississippi Delta, and how print culture helped normalize, circulate, and justify that violence.