America's anti-Chinese laws: a forgotten history

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From the middle of the 19th century, Chinese people in the United States found themselves increasingly policed as legislation was introduced that contained and controlled their economic and cultural lives. Historian Beth Lou Williams has spent countless hours in the archives uncovering this wide ranging set of laws for her book John Doe Chinaman. Beth's book is among the finalists for this year's Cundal History Prize, and in this episode of the History Extra podcast, Eleanor Evans joined her to find out more. Just before we start today's conversation, you might be interested in joining us for a live episode of the History Extra podcast. We're going to be recording tomorrow, the twenty second of October, to mark the upcoming home release of Pressure, the gripping untold story of the effort to chart the weather on D-Day. We've teamed up with Studio Canal for a special event at the Royal Society of Arts in London, featuring David Haig, the writer of Pressure, in conversation with Catherine Ross, Archive Manager at the Met Office.

Tickets are free and are available on a first come, first served basis. For full details and to book your place now, check out the episode description. But for now, it's on to today's conversation. We're going to start with the title, John Do Chinaman, because it's a very conscious choice to use this phrase, but it has a complicated history. Can we start there? Yeah, I think it is always important when I talk about my book to start with the word Chinaman, because you know, it's an ugly word. And I think it's always been a bit of an ugly word, but in the 19th century, which is a time that I'm writing about, it was a word that was everywhere in the United States. It was the word that was used In newspapers and in court trials and in laws, you know, to regulate this group of people from China that were imagined to be racially inferior. I do think that over time the word has become an even more aggressive racial slur.

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