Noelle N. Trent is the Director of Interpretation, Collections, and Education at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. She wrote her doctoral dissertation at Howard University on “Frederick Douglass and the Making of American Exceptionalism.” She has presented papers and lectures at the American Historical Association, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the European Solidarity Center in Poland. In 2018, she curated the exhibition MLK50: A Legacy Remembered, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther…

In October 1950, the newly established People’s Republic of China entered the Korean War on the North Korean side against the United States and other United Nations troops. Many Chinese American citizens expressed deep concern at this turn of events; less than a decade earlier, the US government had disregarded Asian American citizens’ rights when it imprisoned every Japanese American on the West Coast in the months after Pearl Harbor. Another mass incarceration did not occur in 1950, but Chinese Americans’ fears were hardly baseless. Other American citizens continually associated Chinese…

In the summer of 1959, a young couple married and spent their honeymoon in a fallout shelter. Life magazine featured the "sheltered honeymoon" with a photograph of the duo smiling on their lawn, surrounded by dozens of canned goods and supplies. Another photograph showed them kissing as they descended twelve feet underground into the 22-ton, steel and concrete, 8-by-11-foot shelter where they would spend the next two weeks. The article quipped that "fallout can be fun" and described the newlyweds’ adventure as fourteen days of "unbroken togetherness." As the couple embarked on married life…

Race and national origin, writes History Now contributor Madeline Y. Hsu, “have been the main determinants for legal immigration and citizenship.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the record of discrimination faced by Asians seeking to pursue the American dream. In this issue of History Now, our scholars provide a history of the discrimination against Chinese, Korean, and Indian immigrants. They also examine the complex circumstances and the global politics that led to the exclusion and ultimately to the inclusion of Asian immigrants. In our own times, the rise in violence against Asian…

Until the turn of the twentieth century, there were relatively few restrictions on international migration. European imperialism and settler colonialism were sustained by mass migration—both the “free” migration of European settlers and forced migration of enslaved Africans, criminal convicts, and others. The transatlantic slave trade alone brought an estimated 11 million Africans to the Americas. After the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, millions of Chinese and Indian laborers were transferred to work in European colonies across the globe. Settler colonialism involved not just…

According to the 2020 US Census, 1.9 million Korean Americans reside in the United States. Among Asian Americans, they are the fifth-largest ethnic group and primarily reside in California, New York, Hawaii, and Texas. [1] This essay provides an overview of Korean immigration to the United States and the key moments and stories that define the Korean American experience. First Wave The first wave (1903–1905) of Korean migrants were mostly men who worked as contract laborers in the sugar cane fields in Hawaii and migrant farm workers in California. As “a people without a country” under extreme…

The United States harvested a bumper crop of good immigrants in 1955. About 1,000 highly educated Chinese gained citizenship, including acclaimed scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs such as the architect I. M. Pei, the physicist T. D. Lee—who would win the Nobel Prize in 1957—and the computer pioneer An Wang.[1] This unprecedented peak in Chinese immigration was legalized by the US government in order to counter an appeal made by the newly communist Chinese government recruiting Chinese with practical knowledge and skills to return and help rebuild their ancestral homeland. Without…

The United States excluded Chinese people beginning in the late nineteenth century and expanded its ban to all Asians in the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts. In addition to creating a national origins quota system best known for privileging northern and western Europeans over southern and eastern Europeans for the purposes of entry, the 1924 Immigration Act barred all Asians from permanent settlement in the United States on the grounds that they were “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Thus it codified into law Asians’ status as perpetual foreigners. Both the rise and fall of Asian exclusion…

Of all the speeches, letters, and state papers he had written, Abraham Lincoln believed that the greatest of them was his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. With one document of only 713 words, Lincoln declared more than three million slaves in the rebel states of the Confederacy to be "thenceforward and forever free" and took the country a long step to the final abolition of slavery. Lincoln was confident "that the name which is connected with this act will never be forgotten," and that the Proclamation would prove to be "the central act of my administration, and the great event of…

In recent years, the media has tended to portray US Latinos of Hispanic Caribbean ancestry as new immigrants, but this characterization ignores the long connections between these immigrants and the United States. And because Puerto Ricans, who have also had a prolonged presence in the United States, hold a non-immigrant status, their experiences have often been entirely excluded from accounts of US immigrant communities. In fact, the Hispanic Caribbean role in American history originated long before the nineteenth century, and it is well documented in recovered chronicles, letters, and other…