Asian American and Pacific Islander History

During World War II, the United States and Japan fought as bitter enemies. Yet during the Cold War and beyond, Japan arguably became America’s closest and most reliable ally in the Asia Pacific region. How did they make such a successful transition from enemies to allies? It’s ...read more

When bubonic plague hit Honolulu and San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century, officials in those cities quickly did what they had been doing for decades: They villainized residents of Chinese descent. Since the mid 1800s, Asian communities in the U.S. have been among those ...read more

As a survivor of history’s deadliest atomic bombing, Setsuko Thurlow has a powerful case to make against nuclear weapons. On the morning of August 6, 1945, the 13-year-old Thurlow reported to a military office in Hiroshima, along with other girls recruited to help with Japan’s ...read more

In 1974, Chol Soo Lee, a Korean immigrant in his early 20s, was accused and wrongfully convicted of a gangland murder in San Francisco’s Chinatown and sentenced to life in prison. In 1977, after serving several years of his sentence, Lee stabbed a neo-Nazi inmate to death during ...read more

More than 60 years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, Hawaii (Native spelling: Hawaiʻi) officially became America’s 50th state on August 21, 1959. The cluster of islands, situated some 2,400 miles off the U.S. mainland in the South Pacific, followed Alaska, the 49th ...read more

The Golden Age of Hollywood, also known as Classical Hollywood or Old Hollywood, spanned the decades between 1910 and 1960 and typically featured white movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and Elizabeth Taylor—but Asian American actors also acted in prominent ...read more

In 1941, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government, citing “military necessity,” imprisoned some 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. Most were U.S. citizens and half were children. The overwhelming majority of these individuals ...read more

WWII’s Battle of the ‘Lost Battalion’ has been hailed as one of the fiercest—and most heroic—ground battles in American military history. In October 1944, as Allied forces fought to expel the Nazis from France, a unit of Japanese American soldiers deployed on a seemingly ...read more

Larry Itliong was a Filipino American labor leader who organized West Coast farm workers, starting in the 1930s. He became well-known in the 1960s for spearheading the Delano grape strike and teaming with labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to demand farm workers' ...read more

In 1904, anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. rose to a fever pitch as Congress passed an indefinite extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act, almost entirely closing the gates on Chinese immigration. Yet just over a decade later, Beijing-born Wong Tsu came to study at the ...read more

The history of the oldest known permanent Asian American settlement remains mysterious and as murky as the mosquito-infested marshland it was built on. Saint Malo was first established as a fishing village along the shores of Lake Borgne in Louisiana in the 18th century and ...read more

The Tacoma Riot of 1885 and Seattle Riot of 1886 drew national attention to the burgeoning coastal cities in Washington territory for their forced expulsion of their Chinese populations by angry—and largely white—mobs. The actions were part of a brutal wave of anti-Chinese ...read more

In late-May 1887, around 30 Chinese laborers were mining gold in an isolated part of northeast Oregon, when the entire group was gunned down by a white gang of horse thieves. Initially referred to as the “Hells Canyon Massacre” or “Snake River Massacre,” and more recently as the ...read more

Asian American women played a critical part in America’s war effort during World War II. Coming from diverse backgrounds—including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino—they served in important roles ranging from pilots and translators to factory workers and guerrilla fighters. ...read more

It was an unlikely group to storm the streets of New York City’s Chinatown in the summer of 1982: Nearly 20,000 garment workers—mostly Asian American women—marched together in solidarity for better benefits. Clad in matching union caps, they carried signs in both English and ...read more

What began as a labor dispute between white and Chinese coal miners on September 2, 1885 turned into a bloodbath known as the Rock Springs Massacre that left 28 Chinese miners dead and 15 others wounded. Following the violence, white miners set 79 homes ablaze, effectively wiping ...read more

Though the Gold Rush triggered the first major wave of Asian immigrants to the United States in the 1840s, their presence in America predates the country itself. For example, in 1763, facing a life of forced labor and imprisonment during the Spanish galleon trade, a group of ...read more

Located in San Francisco Bay, the Angel Island Immigration Station served as the main immigration facility on the West Coast of the United States from 1910 to 1940. Many immigrants from China or other Asian countries were detained there for extended periods thanks to the Chinese ...read more

Elected in 1964, Patsy T. Mink is sworn in on January 4, 1965, as the first Asian American woman and first woman of color to serve in the U.S. Congress. Throughout her career, the U.S. representative for Hawaii was a strong supporter of civil and women's rights, as well as an ...read more

In 1900, at a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned most Chinese immigration and reflected a climate of deep anti-Asian prejudice, 9-year-old Mabel Ping-Hua Lee came to America from China on a scholarship to attend school. At 16, she would cement her place in women’s ...read more

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is often seen as the first major law to restrict immigration in the United States. But there is an earlier law that was used to effectively prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the United States: The Page Act of 1875. Chinese Immigration in ...read more

In the late 1960s, grapes grabbed national attention—and not in a good way. Newly organized farm workers, fronted by Mexican-American civil-rights activist Cesar Chavez, asked Americans to boycott the popular California fruit because of the paltry pay and poor work conditions ...read more

On June 19, 1982, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin went with friends to a strip club in Detroit to celebrate his upcoming wedding. That night, two white men who apparently thought Chin was Japanese beat him to death. At the killers’ trial, the men each received a $3,000 ...read more

On an early December morning in 1941, waves of Japanese bombers roared through American airspace. While air sirens wailed and guns blazed, American nationals took cover as a surprise attack in the Pacific sank U.S. battleships and crippled the largest aggregation of American ...read more

The night of December 7, 1941 was a panicked one in Hawaii. In the wake of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaiian civilians struggled to understand what had just happened—and to make sense of the announcement that their island was now under martial law. As military ...read more

When Sue Kim arrived to the U.S. after leaving her home in Korea, decimated by war, she found herself performing at the storied Thunderbird and Stardust hotels in Las Vegas. It was 1959, and despite singing songs like Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” to large ...read more

Nearly 70 years before Topeka’s Linda Brown and others challenged restrictive school laws on behalf of African Americans, sparking the legal battle that resulted in the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, 8-year-old Mamie Tape of San Francisco, and her ...read more

Yee Shun was new to Las Vegas, in New Mexico Territory, and he didn’t intend to stay long. Though he’d secured a job at a local hotel, he’d decided to move on to Albuquerque, a frontier city even more promising and bustling than 1882 Las Vegas. But first, he planned to look up a ...read more

In February 1942, a small group of members of a top-secret military language school defied orders. They slipped out of their headquarters in San Francisco and snuck toward their destination, a nearby racetrack. They weren’t there to gamble: They were there to visit their ...read more

In February of 1942, just 10 weeks after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government issued Executive Order 9066, calling for the internment of Japanese Americans. Intended initially to prevent Japanese spies from receiving intel, this order authorized their removal from ...read more

The United States has long been considered a nation of immigrants, but attitudes toward new immigrants by those who came before have vacillated over the years between welcoming and exclusionary. Thousands of years before Europeans began crossing the vast Atlantic by ship and ...read more

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. Many Americans on the West Coast attributed declining wages and economic ills to Chinese workers. Although the Chinese composed only 0.002 percent of the nation's ...read more

On an unusually empty street in New York City, a single cab drops off a woman clad in diamonds and a Givenchy dress in front of Tiffany’s & Co. As she casually gazes up, the iconic opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is underway. But it’s not long before many viewers are ...read more

Women and men began surfing in Hawaii and other Polynesian islands at least as far back as the 17th century. And while Christian missionaries tried to suppress surfing in the 1800s, a Hawaiian princess helped bring it back long before Gidget and Moondoggie hit the beach. Prior to ...read more

Like most Americans, Don Seki and Frank Mitoshi Wada remember the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii as a dark day. For these two “Nisei” (American-born children of Japanese immigrants), December 7th, 1941 was darker than for most, since it led to their ...read more

History Flashback takes a look at historical “found footage” of all kinds—newsreels, instructional films, even cartoons—to give us a glimpse into how much things have changed, and how much has remained the same. On February 19, 1942, just over two months after the bombing of ...read more

You’ve probably seen it: the simple black walls that emerge from the peaceful Constitution Gardens in Washington, D.C., the more than 58,000 half-inch-high names inscribed on the granite. It’s the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and since 1982, it has commemorated military personnel ...read more

Wong Kim Ark was nearly home. As the steamship Coptic slipped through the Golden Gate on an August day in 1895, the young cook could see the buildings huddled on the steep hills of San Francisco, the city where he was born and spent most of his life. Returning to the United ...read more

During World War II, U.S. Major General Henry C. Pratt issues Public Proclamation No. 21, declaring that, effective January 2, 1945, Japanese American “evacuees” from the West Coast could return to their homes. On February 19, 1942, 10 weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl ...read more

March 27, 1912: In Washington, D.C., Helen Taft, wife of President William Taft, and the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, plant two Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the Potomac River, near the Jefferson Memorial. The event was held in celebration ...read more

On September 1, 1964, pitcher Masanori Murakami becomes the first Japanese man to play in U.S. baseball’s major leagues. Murakami pitched a scoreless eighth inning for the San Francisco Giants in a 4-1 loss to the New York Mets in front of 39,379 fans at Shea Stadium. Murakami ...read more

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, initiating a controversial World War II policy with lasting consequences for Japanese Americans. The document ordered the forced removal of resident "enemy aliens" from parts of the West vaguely ...read more