Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

From New Yorker editor and writer Michael Luo, a vivid, urgent history of two centuries of Chinese exclusion and the birth of anti-Asian feeling in America.

In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act—a measure barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty years—Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as a people “residing apart by themselves.” They were, Field concluded, “strangers in the land.” Toda...