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Here are some topics for discussion for tomorrow’s class. What is Hsu’s argument and how does she use her evidence to support her claims? Let’s do a refresher on an important concept in the book – What is the transnationalism … Continue reading →

Rose Hum Lee’s The Chinese in the United States of America, published in 1960 by Hong Kong University Press, is another example of a scholar who was entrenched in bothChinese-American culture and academia. She was a graduate student at the … Continue reading →

This week I followed up on a couple of footnotes from Hsu’s introduction talking about the historiography of Chinese immigration to the United States. I’m now pretty sure I want to analyze how racism and policies relating to the Chinese … Continue reading →

During class last week, I mentioned that one of the topics I am considering focusing on for my final paper is the way that Chinese-American scholars have interacted with and impacted the historiography about Chinese immigrants. Looking at the early … Continue reading →

This week I continued the strand of historiographical research that I began last week and looked at early approaches to Chinese American studies. This has been a particularly helpful exercise because I had previously only read a few older studies … Continue reading →

In her introduction, Madeline Hsu is very critical of the historiography on Chinese immigration that dominated the field into the 1970s because these works essentially subscribed to assimilation models. They concerned themselves either with “explicating passage of the Exclusion laws … Continue reading →

I recently went through the Journal of Ethnic American History’s 1999 forum on the state of the immigration history field. I was pleased to see Jon Gjerde mention Madeline Hsu’s dissertation as an example of the kind of work that … Continue reading →

This week, I made some progress in two areas as I approached Hsu’s book, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home. Since Hsu has framed her book as a transnational work, I first wanted to acquaint myself with transnational theory in … Continue reading →

Madeline Y. Hsu’s Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 tells the complex story of Chinese migration between the city of Taishan in China’s Guangdong province and the United States. … Continue reading →

Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes’ Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 is a welcome study of the ways that mass culture spread throughout the United States and impacted the rest of the world. Published in … Continue reading →