Beth Lew-Williams is a historian of race and migration in the United States. She is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. The Chinese Must Go won five book awards, including the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Caroline Bancroft History Prize.
The Chinese Must Go shows how a country that was moving, in a
piecemeal and halting fashion, toward an expansion of citizenship
for formerly enslaved people and Native Americans, came to deny
other classes of people the right to naturalize altogether…The
stories of racist violence and community shunning are brutal to
read. Lew-Williams particularly excels at invoking the
psychological effects of the law on Chinese people living in the
United States after the exclusion acts passed.
*Slate*
In her skillful retelling of the history of white workers’ violence
against Chinese immigrants and the formulation of laws to first
restrict, and then exclude, Chinese laborers from the United States
in the mid-late 19th century, Beth Lew-Williams weaves a story of
racial discrimination and nativism that continues to resonate
today.
*South China Morning Post*
With scrupulous research and conceptual boldness, Lew-Williams
applies the nuances of a ‘scalar’ lens to contrast anti-Chinese
campaigns at local, regional, and national levels, producing a
social history that significantly remakes the well-established
chronology of Chinese exclusion by highlighting the role of
anti-Chinese violence and vigilantism in advancing immigration
controls on the Chinese from goals of restriction to exclusion.
*Madeline Y. Hsu, author of Asian American History: A Very Short
Introduction*
The Chinese Must Go presents a powerful argument about racial
violence that could not be more timely. It shows why
nineteenth-century pogroms against the Chinese in the American West
resonate today. White nationalists targeted Chinese immigrants as
threats to their homes and jobs and blamed the American government
for failing to seal the borders.
*Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands: The
United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age,
1865–1896*
Moving seamlessly from the local to the international, The Chinese
Must Go offers a riveting, beautifully written new account of
Chinese exclusion, one that foregrounds Chinese voices and
experiences. A timely and important contribution to our
understanding of immigration and the border.
*Karl Jacoby, Columbia University*
An original and compelling analysis of Chinese exclusion in the
second half of the nineteenth century, analyzing how the outbreak
of anti-Chinese violence in 1885 was both caused by and helped
shape American immigration policies.
*Ray Allen Billington Prize Jury*
Simultaneously a beautifully paced, moving read—a powerful and
deeply humane account of the emergence of the racialized border,
the consequences of which have echoed down to the present.
*Ellis W. Hawley Prize Jury*
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