Anna May Wong Steps into the Spotlight

Anna May Wong Steps into the Spotlight

Up next

How Biddy Mason Found Her Freedom in Los Angeles

November 8, 1864. Election Day. Abraham Lincoln watches from a White House window, convinced he might lose. Three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, a Confederate hotbed in a so-called free state, Biddy Mason has more riding on the result than almost anyone in the country.Sixtee ...  Show more

Salem’s First Witch Trial

Happy Halloween! Today, we're bringing back a particularly spooky episode from the archives...June 10, 1692. Bridget Bishop is loaded into a two-wheeled cart and brought from her Salem jail cell to a pasture on a hill, where a rope is hanging from freshly-installed gallows. A cro ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Anna May Wong: Death of a Trailblazer
Mobituaries with Mo Rocca

Anna May Wong wasn't supposed to be in the movies. Her laundryman father was dead set against it. And Hollywood preferred white actors in "yellow face" for Asian characters. But Wong knew what she wanted. With her talent, beauty and tenacity, she ran a gauntlet of social and lega ...  Show more

Yiman Wang, "To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong's Cross-Media World" (U California Press, 2024)
New Books in Film

Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theatre, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinised due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant ...  Show more

Old Hollywood's First Asian Amerian Star, Anna May Wong
Vulgar History: Tudors

We're joined today by Katie Gee Salisbury, author of the new Anna May Wong biography Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong. Katie helps guide us through a discussion of Anna May Wong's life from childhood through Hollywood and European stardom, her tr ...  Show more