Chinese Red Record documents anti-Chinese lynchings, riots, massacres, and expulsions in the American West between 1850 and 1915. Created by Kevin Hegg as a companion to his dissertation work conducted at James Madison University, The Chinese Red Record: Western Lynch Law and the Nationalization of Racial Terror, 1853–1915, the archive takes its title from Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record. It traces how lynching, exclusion, and expulsion worked together to drive Chinese communities from mining camps, railroad towns, and cities across the region. The project draws on a compiled dataset of documented incidents, assembled from newspapers digitized through Chronicling America, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, and Newspapers.com, as well as existing resources such as the CSDE Lynching Database.
Users can browse individual records by date, place, and type of violence, read transcribed newspaper clippings alongside their citations, and explore a timeline, map, and charts, including a visualization comparing lynchings of Black and Chinese victims over time. The dataset is available to download in CSV, Excel, and PDF formats, with fields covering location, accusation, occupation, and method of killing. The site also includes “Ask the Archive,” an AI chat feature for questions about events and themes, which the project notes is not a substitute for browsing the records directly. Visitors can submit evidence of additional incidents for review.
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This post was produced through a cooperation between Melissa Horak-Hern, Mariam Ismail, Trip Kirkpatrick, and Mimosa Shah (Editors-at-Large), Molly McGuire and Rachel Starry (Editors for the week), Claudia Berger, Ruth Carpenter, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Pamella Lach, Hillary Richardson, and Christine Salek (dh+lib Review Editors), and Tom Lee (Technical Editor).