“John Doe Chinaman”: Chinese Life under American Racial Law

About the talk:

Legal discrimination against Chinese people in the United States began in 1852, when California passed a tax on foreign gold miners that was explicitly designed to exploit Chinese labor. 

Over the next seventy years, officials in California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states instituted more than five thousand laws that marginalized and controlled their Chinese residents. 

Drawing on dozens of archives across the US West, Beth Lew-Williams reveals the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life.

About the speaker:

Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History, Director of the Program in Asian American Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018) and, more recently, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, September 2025).

_{Lunch will be served.}