The Chinese Immigrants Who Built America

The Chinese Immigrants Who Built America

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William Parker’s War on Slave Catchers

April 3, 1851. A man who escaped slavery is grabbed off the streets of Boston and thrown into a carriage. He fights back, shouting to the crowd, but it doesn’t matter. Under a new federal law, even the North isn’t safe. The Fugitive Slave Act has turned cities like Boston into hu ...  Show more

The First Robot

March 29th, 1923. A new play opens in Berlin, and quietly changes the future. Onstage are workers who never tire, never complain, and never stop. They’re faster, stronger, and more efficient than humans in every way. They’re called robots. A sci-fi play born out of war and indust ...  Show more

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Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State
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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
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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
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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