The Chinese Immigrants Who Built America

The Chinese Immigrants Who Built America

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The Great Comic Book Scare

February 4, 1955. In a New York courtroom, the Comics Czar takes the stand. He’s in charge of enforcing a new code, meant to keep comic books from corrupting America’s youth, and he’s here to prove that his work has cleaned up the industry. But that afternoon, a noted psychologis ...  Show more

The Dogs Who Saved Nome, Alaska

On January 5, 2026, Jirdes Winther Baxter passed away at 101 years old — the last known survivor of the 1925 diphtheria epidemic in Nome, Alaska. A few years ago, we told the story of the Serum Run: the desperate relay of mushers and sled dogs who carried a life-saving antitoxin ...  Show more

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Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State
Conversations with Tyler

Yasheng Huang has written two of Tyler's favorite books on China: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, which contrasts an entrepreneurial rural China a ...

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The Characters That Built China
Throughline

Today, China is a global superpower. But less than two hundred years ago, the nation was in a state of decline. After what became known as the 'century of humiliation' at the hands of Western imperialist powers, its very survival was in question. A movement arose to fight off for ...  Show more

China's trailblazing foreign students
Witness History

China has the largest number of overseas students in the world but when students first started venturing out of Communist China it was still a country feeling the aftereffects of the Cultural Revolution. Launched in 1966 by Communist leader Mao Zedong the Cultural Revolution plun ...  Show more

Melissa Macauley, "Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier" (Princeton UP, 2021)
New Books in East Asian Studies

“The Europeans raise all the cattle, but the Chinese get all the milk.” This joke, told in colonial Singapore, was indicative of the importance of the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia. Chinese migrants were miners, laborers, merchants and traders: the foundation of many ...  Show more