Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans June 7, 2007

Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of American Studies, will be reading from Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans

About the book: The brutal and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking–and virtually unexplored–chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation’s past.

Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians purged dozens of communities of thousands of Chinese residents–and how the victims bravely fought back.

In town after town, as races and classes were pitted against one another in the raw and anarchistic West, Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field workers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives, were gathered up at gunpoint and marched out of town, sometimes thrown into railroad cars along the very tracks they had built.

Prof. Praelzer was also interviewed by Leonard Lopate:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2007/06/06

Official Website: http://www.moca-nyc.org/