This History U course offers an overview of the history of Chinese in America, emphasizing Chinese American identity and community formations under the shadow of the Yellow Peril.
Course Instructor: Professor Madeline Hsu, University of Maryland, College Park
Eligibility: High school students
Image Source: Ed Ford, "Americanized Chinese Gals on Mott St. / World Telegram & Sun," 1965 (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, 95505467)
History U
Free for high school students
This History U course offers an overview of the history of Chinese in America, emphasizing Chinese American identity and community formations under the shadow of the Yellow Peril. Examining United States history through the lens of Chinese experiences emphasizes the national development of ideas and practices concerning immigration controls, rights to citizenship, multiracial societies, forms of multicultural integration and assimilation, and the relationship of the Constitution to varying conceptions of equality. Chinese as a race were the first targets of enforced immigration restrictions. As such, they have played key roles as the US determined its powers and priorities in enacting immigration controls and its visions for democracy, along with the underlying racial ideologies and conceptions of national belonging.
The views expressed in this course are those of Dr. Madeline Hsu.
Misha Matsumoto Yee explains what you will learn in this course.
Madeline Hsu, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Global Migration Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
Madeline Y. Hsu is a professor of history and director of the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her first book was Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000). Her monograph The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015) received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Association for Asian American Studies. Her third book, Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016, and the co-edited anthology A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 was published in 2019 by the University of Illinois Press.
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