Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans

by Jean Pfaelzer

Overview

Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants' wives were violently loaded onto railroad cars or steamers, marched out of town, or killed.

But the Chinese fought back—with arms, strikes, and lawsuits and by flatly refusing to leave. When red posters appeared on barns and windows across the United States urging the Chinese to refuse to carry photo identity cards, more than one hundred thousand joined the largest mass civil disobedience to date in the United States. The first Chinese Americans were marched out and starved out. But even facing brutal pogroms, they stood up for their civil rights. This is a story that defines us as a nation and marks our humanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520256941
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/01/2008
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jean Pfaelzer is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Delaware. She is author of The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form, among other books. She was Executive Director of the National Labor Law Center and was appointed to the Washington DC Commission for Women.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION
The Chinese Called It Pai Hua, or The Driven Out

1
GOLD!
“Peaceably if We Can, Forcibly if We Must”

2
DEAD BRANCHES

3
THE WOMAN’S TALE
“In Case I Should Be Kidnapped”

4
THE EUREKA METHOD
“We Have No Chinese”

5
THE TRUCKEE METHOD
Fire and Ice

6
THE CHINESE REWRITE THE
LETTER OF THE LAW

7
A LITANY OF HATE
The 1880s

8
THE DOG TAG LAW

CONCLUSION
“No Place for a Chinaman”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX