History of Chinese in the United States (Teacher Seminar Online)

This seminar will offer an overview of the history of Chinese in America with an emphasis on Chinese American identity and community formations under the shadow of the Yellow Peril. Chinese as a race were the first targets of enforced immigration restrictions. As such, they have played key roles in the history of race and immigration policy. Participants will examine structures of work, family, immigration law, racism, class, and gender in order to understand the changing roles and perceptions of Chinese Americans in the United States from 1847 to the present.

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Madeline Y. Hsu, Lead Scholar

Madeline Hsu is a professor of history at the University of Maryland, where she is also director of the Center for Global Migration Studies and affiliate faculty with the Asian American Studies Program. Until summer 2023, she was a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and served as the director of the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin. She was president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and is presently representative-at-large for the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas. Hsu is the author of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015), which 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. She is also the author of Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000) and Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Nina Wohl, Master Teacher

Nina Wohl spent thirty years in the classroom teaching the full range of high school social studies courses, including AP United States History, AP Macroeconomics, AP World History, and AP European History. She was a lead teacher at the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School and served as a senior education fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Institute for the 2022–2023 academic year. Nina has scored the APUSH & APWH exams and was a teacher advisor for the New-York Historical Society, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the New York Geographic Alliance. She has also written curriculum for LaGuardia and Wagner Archives in conjunction with the New York Times.