Anti-Chinese Violence and the National Significance of Local Vigilantism

This talk will put the history of anti-Chinese violence in conversation with the better-known histories of anti-Black and anti-indigenous violence in the late-nineteenth-century United States. Lew-Williams will argue that anti-Chinese violence served national political purposes (in addition to immediate local aims) and will suggest that expulsions of the Chinese were part of a larger pattern of violent racial politics after the Civil War.