The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (Asian America) 1st Edition by Gordon H. Chang (PDF)

Description

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869 is usually told as a story of national triumph and a key moment for American Manifest Destiny. The Railroad made it possible to cross the country in a matter of days instead of months, paved the way for new settlers to come out west, and helped speed America’s entry onto the world stage as a modern nation that spanned a full continent. It also created vast wealth for its four owners, including the fortune with which Leland Stanford would found Stanford University some two decades later. But while the Transcontinental has often been celebrated in national memory, little attention has been paid to the Chinese workers who made up 90 percent of the workforce on the Western portion of the line. The Railroad could not have been built without Chinese labor, but the lives of Chinese railroad workers themselves have been little understood and largely invisible.This landmark volume explores the experiences of Chinese railroad workers and their place in cultural memory. The Chinese and the Iron Road illuminates more fully than ever before the interconnected economies of China and the US, how immigration across the Pacific changed both nations, the dynamics of the racism the workers encountered, the conditions under which they labored, and their role in shaping both the history of the railroad and the development of the American West.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “The long-awaited The Chinese and the Iron Road makes visible the previously invisible Chinese railroad workers who built America’s first transcontinental railroad. They are given names, family lives, homes, spiritual beliefs, and agency. The research is astounding. The wide variety of interdisciplinary, international, and collaborative perspectives―from archaeology to family history―is revelatory and a model for future collaborative projects. This timely and essential volume preserves the humanity of the often-ignored and forgotten immigrant worker, while also uncovering just how important Chinese American railroad workers were in the making of America and its place in the world.” — Erika Lee ― author of The Making of Asian America”Destined to become the go-to resource about Chinese railroad workers in the American West. This anthology assembles an international, interdisciplinary team of leading scholars to conduct the most extensive and thoughtful exploration of these near-mythic, yet heretofore scantly researched, historical subjects producing insights not only into the material conditions of their labor and lives but also the ideological implications of their ubiquity contrasted against their individual illegibility.”–Madeline Hsu, author of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority”To understand the emergence of the United States as a major player on the world stage, we must recognize the importance of its two-ocean power, which the transcontinental railroad made possible. Deeply researched and richly detailed, The Chinese and the Iron Road brings to life the Chinese immigrants whose work was essential to the railroad’s construction.” — Thomas Bender ― author of A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History”When I wrote a play in the early 1980s about Chinese workers on the American transcontinental railroad, information was scarce, and often of questionable accuracy. Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s meticulously researched and beautifully written book fills this critical gap in our nation’s history. The Chinese and the Iron Road brings to life the stories of workers who defied incredible odds and gave their lives to unite these states into a nation.” — David Henry Hwang ― Tony Award–winning playwright of The Dance and the Railroad and M. Butterfly”[An] eclectic and comprehensive study that brings visibility to the monumental and very intimate human stories too long submerged beneath the pageantry of the golden spike ceremony.” — Timothy Dean Draper ― Journal of American Ethnic History”Scholars Gordon Chang [and Shelley Fisher Fishkin] deserve praise for this…memorial, a commemoration to the almost entirely nameless thousands whose labor became the biographical [Stanford] university itself.” — William Deverell ― Pacific Historical Review”Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s monumental edited work The Chinese and the Iron Road is an impressive collection of interdisciplinary essays….This collection is essential and provides tools for scholars seeking to understand not only the lives of Chinese railroad workers but also the U.S. West and any other groups that left behind few written sources. Specialists and lay readers alike are encouraged to read this engaging work.” — Stephanie Hinnershitz ― Journal of American History”[This] exciting collection of scholarly articles represents a major contribution to labor history and to the new wave of Chinese-American studies that is global in scope but intensely focused on recovering and illuminating the lives of the ten- to fifteen- thousand Chinese workers who constructed the Central Pacific Railroad section of the Transcontinental Railroad.” — Robert Cliver ― Technology and Culture”[Detailed] and informative. The anthology shows the care that these authors and scholars who are part of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project took in trying to piece together a largely unknown narrative. The sheer attempt of such a project is commendable.” — Marimas Hosan Mostiller ― China Review International”[A] generous and beautiful [offering] to the ghosts of California’s landscapes, necessary for the deep reckoning that is sorely needed in that storied place.” — Douglas Cazaux Sackman ― Reviews in American History About the Author Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin are Co-Directors of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford; Hilton Obenzinger is Associate Director and Roland Hsu is Director of Research.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A remarkable series of essays resurrecting some of the “lives” of the Chinese workers who built much of western USA’s railroads.Two of the essayists, to me at least, let the team down. One waxing lyrical about a photo of a speeding train with the Chinese workers left behind and not a part of the new age – only the train was obviously stationary on a spur running parallel to the main track. The other letdown was using as “proof” acknowledged fiction stories written by decedents of Chinese track layers and using the tales as reflecting the times due a tenuous relationship with people the authors had never known. Even so, the book definitely deserves a five star rating!Each and every other essay was brilliant, filled with well-researched information and deduced insights. The book was both enjoyable and a remarkable, much-needed work.

⭐In what should have been a stellar event for Chinese Americans, the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad was totally ignored by our President. Since he discounts all contributions that made America great by minorities such as black slaves and oriental coolies, it is no wonder that he could care less. Now, if people would buy and read this book, they would learn something

⭐I’d like to swell and I get to finally give me a history of Chinese contribution to the railroad building.

⭐Got for my husband. Seems to be reading it.

⭐While informative the book reads more like an academic dissertation.

⭐interesting side of history, and its consequences

⭐study

⭐This collection of academic essays thoroughly explores a relatively forgotten episode in US labor and racial histories: the use of Chinese transient contract labor in building the transcontinental railroad systems of the mid-to-late 1800s. Although loaded with “race and gendered” terminology as they seek to “recover” and “construct narratives,” looking past this will reward the reader with insight into the ill-paid life of cheap and transient labor on the American frontier.In a region remote from European immigration centers, the Chinese migrant had already been “discovered” as a usable resource on the West Coast and was contracted from the south China-Pearl River region in literal droves, much as Mexican migrant labor is sought in modern construction industries. Since this traffic was technically illegal, the Chinese migrant was legally bound to non-citizenship status during his “sojourn.” Amounting to indentured servitude during his contract term, it createda racial-caste-class system not unlike the post-Civil War south. Hence the working class white resentment over “preferred candidates” for explotable labor throughout the late 19th century west.These essays cover all aspects of the Chinese laborer on the line, from migration patterns to conditions of work, inner community life, relations with larger US society, and even relations with “indiginous tribes” (though this is a sketchy subject requiring much imaginative “construction” in its own right.) The collection does not, however, explore the subssequent fate of these workers once the railroad had been built. The last piece on the Chinese community relationship with Leland Stanford, tycoon-in-chief of the Central Pacific Railroad, illustrates the point.Although the biggest employer of Chinese labor in North America, Stanford’s equivocal attitude sealed the fate of the Chinese in the western US. At one point a “friend” of Chinese immigrant labor, at another the ally of anti-Chinese demagogues, his behavior pattern suggests a desire to exploit their usefulness yet keep them subject to racial restriction and dependency. As soon as the railroad was completed and laid-off Chinese workers expanded into mining and agriculture, they immdeiately butted heads with competing whites and were “driven out” by force from areas of white labor interest. Elites like Stanford, who had built his “empire” off their backs, stood by passively.A worthwhile, if at times heavy-handed and “gendered” account of immigrant and minority labor in one American region.

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