![]() Many Chinese also began to travel eastward in the United States to settle in urban centers considered more friendly toward foreigners due to a more diverse population. Nonetheless, Chinese laborers found employment in domestic services, fishing, agriculture, and other industries. Besides discriminating against the Chinese laborers in the workplace, the local communities saw them as strange for their difference in appearance, culture, and language.įollowing the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad and the subsequent depression (following the panic of 1873), many Chinese laborers became out of work, resulting in heightened tensions between Chinese workers and white workers who now had to compete for limited jobs. As a result, this caused Chinese laborers to be viewed as unwanted foreign competition. American companies preferred to hire Chinese laborers because they were cheaper than hiring white American workers. The cause for this hatred was the fear of job loss. ![]() Railroad foremen would assign Chinese laborers the most dangerous jobs such as detonating dynamite, which resulted in the death of thousands of Chinese laborers. Within the workplace, fellow non-Chinese colleagues treated Chinese laborers poorly. Chinese immigration to the United States continued to increase and by 1870, according to the US Census, there were over 63,000 Chinese in the United States. Upon their arrival to the United States, Chinese immigrants quickly realized that mining was both difficult and highly competitive work.Īlmost a decade later, in the 1860s, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad served as another major employment opportunity for Chinese laborers. Overseas, in the southern region of China where people were reeling from the economic and class instability resulting from the Taiping Revolution (1850-864) and the Opium War (1839-1842), the news of a Gold Mountain (Gum Saam) in the United States prompted many Chinese to leave their homes in hopes of bettering their economic situations. This event marks the beginning of the Gold Rush of 1848, where hundreds of people came to California in hopes of striking it rich. Marshall found gold in Northern California. The story of many historic Chinatowns across the United States began in 1848 when James W. Below is a brief history of Chinese Americans, followed by a link to the StoryMap. In the summer of 2021, Yee sought to identify the current state of preservation activity, current research and available data, and types of places related to Chinatowns in the United States. An invaluable correction of a great historical injustice, The Ghosts of Gold Mountain returns these “silent spikes” to their rightful place in our national saga.Editor’s Note: This history of Chinatowns in the United States is part of a StoryMap developed by Karen Yee, a graduate student researcher from the University of Maryland. ![]() ![]() Chang draws on unprecedented research to recover the Chinese railroad workers’ stories and celebrate their role in remaking America. In this groundbreaking account, award-winning scholar Gordon H. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would suffer a different kind of death-a historical one, as they were pushed first to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. ![]()
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