Shaping and Reshaping Chinese American Identity: New York's Chinese in the Years of the Depression and World War II explores the role played by Chinese Americans in New York in the 1930's who laid the foundation for future generations to fight for civil rights as American citizens. The stories of Chinese Americans during the Depression years and World War II are under-represented in the existing literature that has been confined to the early days of the settlement of Chinese Americans on the west coast of the United States. They were usually depicted as passive victims of exclusion as a result of Chinese Exclusion Laws. This book focuses on the active participation of the Chinese American in New York City in mainstream political, economic, and social life that helped them to forge new identity as Chinese Americans. Their active participation in federal and local elections as a means of claiming their rights as American citizens demonstrated their growing political consciousness. Chinese New Yorkers' support of both China and United States during the war reflected their dual identity as both Chinese and Americans. Their contributions to the war front and to the home front after Pearl Harbor eventually forced the reconsideration of the Chinese Exclusion Laws. The book concludes by relating the active participation of the Chinese in New York during the war years to the national movement for racial equality that resulted in new federal civil rights legislation.

This in-depth historical analysis highlights the enormous contributions of Chinese Americans to the professions, politics, and popular culture of America, from the 19th century through the present day. While the number of Chinese Americans has grown very rapidly in the last decade, this group has long thrived in the United States in spite of racism, discrimination, and segregation. This comprehensive volume takes a global view of the Chinese experience in the Americas. While the focus is on Chinese Americans in the United States, author Jonathan H. X. Lee also explores the experiences of Chinese immigrants in Canada, Mexico, and South America. He considers why the Chinese chose to leave their home country, where they settled, and how the distinctive Chinese American identity was formed. This volume is organized into four sections: historical overview; political and economic life; cultural and religious life; and literature, the arts, and popular culture. Detailed essays capture the essence of everyday life for this immigrant group as they assimilated, established communities, and interacted with other ethnic groups. Alphabetically arranged entries describe the political, social, and religious institutions begun by Chinese Americans and explores their roles as business owners, activists, and philanthropic benefactors for their communities.

While the Chinese urban movement has successfully transferred surplus labor from the countryside to urban industries that urgently require free and cheap labor, numerous problems have arisen as a result of the unprecedented huge-scale process. Such conditions such as overcrowding, substandard housing, lack of social services, corruption, and abuse of power have often reached crisis stage. American college students often ask: How does the government control the largest urban population in the world? Why do newly developed, highly commercialized cities continue to support the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rather than challenging the old regime? What happens when urban residents have problems with a party-controlled government? This book, collects essays from the best scholars in their fields and examines urban issues, including identifying residents’ concerns, analyzing policy problems, and providing some answers to these pivotal questions. They address this important topic from a Chinese-American perspective through a cooperative interdisciplinary research effort among Chinese-American scholars interested in the subject. Their scholarship makes a significant contribution through multi-faceted components from different fields such as economics, political science, criminal justice, law, anthropology, sociology, and education. The authors introduce and explore the theory and practice of policy patterns, political systems, and social institutions by identifying key issues in Chinese government and society contained within the larger framework of the international sphere. Originally from Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Tianjin, and other cities in China, these authors have received training and advanced degrees from American universities and colleges, thus bringing uncommon perspective and conclusions by focusing on urban studies specific to China. Their endeavors move beyond the existing scholarship and seek to spark new debates and proposed solutions while reflecting on established schools of history, religion, linguistics, and gender studies. Crucial to this volume is the assessment of historical and empirical data found in these essays that place major events in the context of Chinese tradition, its culture, and national security. Using comprehensive coverage to create a broad and solid foundation of knowledge, this collection presents a better understanding of the current Chinese metropolitan climate and includes legitimate issues with city policy implementation.

Denver’s Chinatown 1875-1900: Gone But Not Forgotten explores the coming of the Chinese to the Western frontier and their experiences in Denver during its early development from a supply station for the mining camps to a flourishing urban center. The complexity of race, class, immigration, politics, and economic policies interacted dynamically and influenced the life of early Chinese settlers in Denver. The Denver Riot, as a consequence of political hostility and racial antagonism against the Chinese, transformed the life of Denver’s Chinese, eventually leading to the disappearance of Denver's Chinatown. But the memory of a neighborhood that was part of the colorful and booming urban center remains.

The immigration station at New York's Ellis Island opened in 1892 and remained the largest U.S. port for immigrant entry until World War I. In popular memory, Ellis Island is typically seen as a gateway for Europeans seeking to join the "great American melting pot." But as this fresh examination of Ellis Island's history reveals, it was also a major site of immigrant detention and exclusion, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian travelers and maritime laborers who reached New York City from Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and even within the United States. And from 1924 to 1954, the station functioned as a detention camp and deportation center for a range of people deemed undesirable. Anna Pegler-Gordon draws on immigrants' oral histories and memoirs, government archives, newspapers, and other sources to reorient the history of migration and exclusion in the United States. In chronicling the circumstances of those who passed through or were detained at Ellis Island, she shows that Asian exclusion was both larger in scope and more limited in force than has been previously recognized.

We think we know the story of women's suffrage in the United States: women met at Seneca Falls, marched in Washington, D.C., and demanded the vote until they won it with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But the fight for women's voting rights extended far beyond these familiar scenes. From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin. In Recasting the Vote, Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina "Nina" Luna Otero-Warren. With these feminists of color in the foreground, Cahill recasts the suffrage movement as an unfinished struggle that extended beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. As we celebrate the centennial of a great triumph for the women's movement, Cahill's powerful history reminds us of the work that remains.

Tong Wars is historical true-crime set against the perfect landscape: Chinatown, New York City. Chinese rival tongs (secret societies) each lauded over illegal markets such as gambling and prostitution, and nothing could shut them down. Not threats or negotiations, not prison, not even executions. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next 30 years. This is the true account of these wars, turf wars fuelled by gangsters and drug lords, prostitutes, judges and cops.

Evolution of Power: China's Struggle, Survival, and Success, edited by Xiaobing Li and Xiansheng Tian, brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to provide a comprehensive look at China’s rapid socio-economic transformation and the dramatic changes in its political institution and culture. Investigating subjects such as party history, leadership style, personality, political movements, civil-military relations, intersection of politics and law, and democratization, this volume situates current legitimacy and constitutional debates in the context of both the country’s ideology and traditions and the wider global community. The contributors to this volume clarify key Chinese conceptual frameworks to explain previous subjects that have been confusing or neglected, offering case studies and policy analyses connected with power struggles and political crises in China. A general pattern is introduced and developed to illuminate contemporary problems with government accountability, public opposition, and political transparency. Evolution of Power provides essential scholarship on China’s political development and growth.

Historians of immigration and ethnicity in the United States have typically devoted little attention to Greek Americans, while popular narratives depict them as indifferent or hostile to political and social radicalism. From acclaimed historian Kostis Karpozilos, Red America provides an alternative narrative of the Greek American experience. Focusing on the history of the Greek American Left from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Cold War, this volume uncovers the threads that bound notions of radical social change to everyday immigrant life, tracing ethnic radicalism from the boundaries of a specific community to the epicenter of American social and political history.

Immigrants Outside Megalopolis documents the shift of immigrants toward smaller towns and metropolitan areas in the United States, presenting eleven case studies of immigrant groups in widely differing parts of the country. These case studies highlight both the new cultural landscapes that are giving Americans a world geography lesson, and the tales of accommodation and acceptance, of rejection and discrimination, that suggest that the process of social adjustment is not yet complete.