Asian American historiography is quite peculiar: until the early 1960s, virtually none of the books about Asians in America were written by historians. The sizable literature that exists has been authored, instead, by missionaries, diplomats, politicians, labor leaders, journalists, propagandists, and scholars trained in sociology, economics, social psychology, and political science. Only in the last fifteen years have professional historians moved to center stage in the construction of historical knowledge about Asian Americans. This legacy causes difficulties for historians specializing in Asian American history today: not only must they laboriously excavate widely scattered, fragmentary, “buried” evidence, but they must also correct biased interpretations and a great deal of misinformation.

The writing of Asian American history may be divided into four somewhat overlapping periods. The first, characterized by partisanship, lasted from the 1870s to the early 1920s. The second, from the late 1910s to the early 1960s, was dominated by social scientists. The third, during which eclectic, revisionist works appeared, extended from the 1960s to the early 1980s. During the fourth (present) stage, which began in the early 1980s, Asian American historiography is finally coming of age.

The first books about Asians in the United States were highly partisan because the immigration of Chinese and Japanese was enormously controversial. The Oldest and the Newest Empire (1870), The Chinese in America (1877), and Chinese Immigration: Its Social and Economic Aspects (1881) written, respectively, by two missionaries, William Speer and Otis Gibson, and a diplomat, George F. Seward, defended Chinese immigration. All three authors had lived and worked in China. Each tried to calm American fears about the growing Chinese presence in the United States by discussing various facets of Chinese civilization and by depicting the Chinese as a hardworking, harmless people. Arrayed against these treatises were such sensationalist accounts as The Coming Struggle by M. B. Starr (1873), Last Days of the Republic by Pierton W. Dooner (1880), and A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of Oregon and California by the Chinese in the Year 1899 by Robert Woltor (1882) that kindled anxieties about a Yellow Peril invasion.

Even the first heavily-footnoted scholarly study in Asian American history, Chinese Immigration by Mary Roberts Coolidge (1909), was openly partisan. Coolidge tried to make the Chinese look good by making other groups look bad: she exposed the corruption of European American diplomats and immigration officials, the self-interest of politicians, and the racism of Irish immigrants and Southerners who had migrated to California.

The anti-Chinese clamor became less loud as exclusionary laws began to reduce the number of Chinese in the United States, but it was soon replaced by agitation against Japanese immigration. A second set of authors emerged with pro- and anti-Japanese books. Sidney L. Gulick, a former missionary in Japan and an activist in the peace movement during the World War I era, defended the Japanese influx in The American Japanese Problem (1914) and American Democracy and Asiatic Citizenship (1918). He was joined in his efforts by several Japanese writers fluent in English. Among the books the latter produced were Asia at the Door (1914) and The Real Japanese Question (1921) by Kiyoshi Karl Kawakami, a propagandist; California and the Japanese by Kiichi Kanzaki (1921), a general secretary of the Japanese Association of America; Japan and the California Problem by T. Iyenaga and Kenoske Sato (1921), two political scientists who had taught and studied, respectively, at the University of Chicago; Japanese-American Relations by Iichiro Tokutomi (1922), a member of Japan’s House of Peers and editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Kokumin Shimbun; and The Unsolved Problem of the Pacific by Kiyo Sue Inui (1925), lecturer in international relations at Occidental College, the University of Southern California, and Tokyo University and a delegate to the League of Nations. The most scholarly works in this genre are two books by Yamato Ichihashi, Japanese Immigration (1913) and Japanese in the United States (1932), in which he marshaled an impressive amount of information in order to persuade the American public that the Japanese were assimilating (contrary to popular assumptions) and were not causing any problems.

While these well educated and highly placed writers did their best to counter the charges against Japanese immigration in general, they revealed a strong class bias. They tried to smooth the ruffled racial feathers of European Americans by admitting that the behavior of Japanese immigrant laborers might indeed be objectionable but they insisted that “higher class” Japanese were as refined as European Americans and should therefore be welcomed. A similar snobbery can be detected in The Real Chinese in America by J. S. Tow (1923), a Chinese consular officer.

Works pitted against continued Japanese immigration came in the form of sociological studies, novels, and propaganda tracts. The Valor of Ignorance by Homer Lea (1909), The Japanese Conquest of American Opinion by Montaville Flowers (1917), The Japanese Invasion by Jesse Steiner (1917), The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard (1920), Seed of the Sun by Wallace Irwin (1920), The Pride of Palomar by Peter B. Kyne (1921), and Japanese Immigration and Colonization by V. S. McClatchy (1921) all articulated a great fear—images of an America overrun, overwhelmed, or overtaken by Japanese, whom the authors recognized were not an inferior race. Precisely because those who opposed Japanese immigration could not be certain whether European Americans or Japanese would win in a “race war,” they wanted to make sure that the racial frontier along the Pacific Coast would remain impregnable. Therefore Japanese immigrants, however small their numbers, could not be allowed to establish even the tiniest foothold there.

Whether they defended or attacked Chinese and Japanese immigration, the writings produced during the first historiographical period should be read today not as works of historical scholarship but, rather, as documents that reveal the temper of the times in which they were produced. For this reason, they still serve a useful purpose.

Books published during the second historiographical period were less impassioned. Written mainly by social scientists, they concentrated on three topics: the assimilation of Asian Americans; the social organization of Asian communities in America; and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The most notable studies on assimilation were done by sociologists affiliated with the University of Chicago. Robert E. Park, the leading light in the sociology department at Chicago, hypothesized that all immigrants passed through a race relations cycle consisting of four stages of interaction with the host society: contact; competition; accommodation; and assimilation. Only two groups did not fit this paradigm—African Americans and Asian Americans. Park and his colleagues thus were intrigued by the “Negro problem” and the “Oriental problem.” Their chance to investigate the latter came in late 1923 when Park was appointed as the director of research for the Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast. This project was initiated by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, whose officers had an international outlook and practiced the social gospel. They deemed the proposed survey a “great peace promoting task” to improve race relations along the Pacific Coast through the collection of objective, empirical data.

The project never achieved its goals due to a shortage of funds and opposition from anti-Asian groups in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. However, the half dozen sociologists and their graduate assistants assembled for the project did manage to record over six hundred life histories from Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and (East or Asian) Indians between 1924 and 1926. They also collected reams of miscellaneous documents. Several books based on this information were published: The Second-Generation Oriental in America by William C. Smith (1927), Oriental Exclusion by Roderic D. McKenzie (1928), Immigration and Race Attitudes by Emory Bogardus (1928), and Americans in Process by William C. Smith (1937). Resident Orientals on the American Pacific Coast by Eliot Grinnel Mears (1928) was also an indirect offshoot of the project. These social scientists were quite sympathetic to the plight of second-generation Asian Americans. As Romanzo Adams put it in the preface he wrote for Smith’s 1937 book, “The real question is not one of the capacity of the Orientals, but of our ability to give them a fair opportunity. . . . America should understand the young men and women of Oriental ancestry . . . have been born in our own country. . . . These young people are American citizens. . . . (They) are a part of us. . . . Whether they shall make their due contribution to American life or whether they shall be an irritant depends largely on the way Americans of the older stock meet them.”

The Chicago School’s immense intellectual influence was also felt in dozens of M. A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations written by Filipino graduate students under the mentorship of Emory Bogardus at the University of Southern California. Two books about Filipinos, Filipino Immigration by Bruno Lasker (1931) and The Taxi Dance Hall by Paul G. Cressey (1932), as well as several studies done in Hawaii, Interracial Marriages in Hawaii by Romanzo Adams (1937), An Island Community: Ecological Succession in Hawaii by Andrew W. Lind (1938), and a fine Ph.D. dissertation completed by Clarence E. Glick in 1938 but not revised for publication until 1980 under the title, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii, likewise reflect the Chicago School’s theoretical assumptions and fieldwork methods. Another landmark study that originated as a University of Chicago sociology dissertation also took more than three decades to get in print: The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation by Paul C. P. Siu (1987). Siu began his research in 1938 but did not submit his completed dissertation until 1953. In it, he modified Georg Simmel’s concept of the “sojourner” to organize his rich ethnographic data.

In addition to the sociologists associated with the Survey of Race Relations, educational psychologists at Stanford University also produced several important studies about the adaptation of Asian Americans in the 1930s. Vocational Aptitude of Second-Generation Japanese in the United States (1933) and Japanese in California by Edward K. Strong, Jr. (1933), and Public School Education of Second-Generation Japanese in California by Reginald Bell (1935)—summarized in a single volume, The Second-Generation Japanese Problem (1934)—reported that the general abilities of Asian students were not inferior to those of European American students. However, given the prevalence of racial prejudice, Strong and Bell advised their “Oriental” students to be realistic in their career choices and to refrain from applying for jobs for which they would not be considered.

A second topic that fascinated social scientists, as well as journalists, from the 1930s through the 1960s was the social organization of Asian communities in America. European American and Asian American writers alike tried to fathom the unique characteristics (more derisively called the “social pathology”) of these ethnic ghettos. The publication of books on this topic spanned several decades: Chinatown Inside Out by Leong Gor Yun (1936), San Francisco’s Chinatown by Charles C. Dobie (1936), Social Solidarity Among the Japanese in Seattle by S. Frank Miyamoto (1939), The Growth and Decline of Chinese Communities in the Rocky Mountain Region, a dissertation completed by Rose Hum Lee in 1947 but not published until 1978, and The Chinese in the U.S.A. by Rose Hum Lee (1960). The influence of the Chicago School is also apparent here: Miyamoto and Lee were among the first Asian American sociologists to be trained at the University of Chicago.

During World War II, several teams of social scientists seized the opportunity provided by the incarceration of 112,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in so-called relocation camps to investigate how people function in confined situations. Sociologists, demographers, political scientists, and anthropologists dutifully recorded the minutiae of life behind barbed wire. Some of the social scientists were employed as resident community analysts by the War Relocation Authority that administered the camps while others worked independently. The literature on this shameful episode in U.S. history is so vast that only a few titles can be mentioned here. Prejudice: Japanese Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance by Carey McWilliams (1944) and Americans Betrayed by Morton Grodzins (1949) were extremely critical of the internment. The three volumes that came out of the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study, The Spoilage by Dorothy S. Thomas and Richard S. Nishimoto (1946), The Salvage by Dorothy S. Thomas (1952), and Prejudice, War and the Constitution by Jacobus ten Broek, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd W. Matson (1954), in contrast, were apologist in their orientation.

Several books published during the second period do not fit into any of the above three categories. The Anti-Chinese Movement in California by Elmer C. Sandmeyer (1939) has the distinction of being the first major study in Asian American history written by a professional historian. In 1946, Milton R. Konvitz produced the first study of Asian American legal history, The Alien and the Asiatic in American Law. Next, Fred W. Riggs examined the political maneuvers leading to the repeal, in 1943, of the Chinese exclusion laws in Pressure on Congress (1950). In The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii (1953), Hilary Conroy examined how the Japanese government, the Hawaiian government, and American sugar planters negotiated the terms under which tens of thousands of Japanese came to work in Hawaii’s sugar plantations.

During both the first and second historiographical periods, regardless of what topic was under investigation, the Asian presence in the United States was almost invariably framed as a “problem.” Because they allegedly failed to assimilate, Asian Americans were considered deficient or deviant. In the early 1970s, young Asian American activists on college and university campuses rebelled against such negative portrayals of their forebears and themselves. They rejected the assimilationist paradigm and proposed several alternatives. One was classical Marxist theory, which they extended to encompass Asian Americans as workers exploited by a capitalist system. A second was the internal colonialism model developed by black and Chicano scholars, which allowed them to think of Asian ethnic communities as internal colonies. A third depicted Asian Americans as brothers and sisters of people in Asian nations who had suffered under Western imperialism. The second and third models addressed the same phenomenon at different geographic sites—the European and American colonization of Africa, Latin America, and Asia and their peoples, including those who had been transported to North America as immigrants, indentured migrant laborers, or slaves. According to this view, racial minorities in the United States were a “Third World within,” whose members shared a common history of oppression with people living in the “Third World without.” In their own eyes, the Asian American activists who sought to “decolonize” research and to establish ethnic studies programs during the late 1960s and 1970s were engaged in a struggle that was simultaneously anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist.

The campus activists produced few book-length studies. The best repositories for their radical perspectives are two anthologies published by the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA: Roots edited by Amy Tachiki et al. (1971) and Counterpoint edited by Emma Gee et al. (1976). Marxist analysis also permeates the chapters in Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II edited by Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (1984), another UCLA product. Chinatown, N.Y. by Peter Kwong (1979) likewise valorizes Asian workers.

More important than the publication of formal books was the proliferation of community-based magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies in the 1970s. These publications contained a panoply of Asian American voices, many of them angry and defiant. With the introduction first, of typewriters with changeable fonts, and later, of computers and letter-quality (and eventually laser) printers, Asian American writers no longer had to depend on commercial or academic publishers to disseminate their works. For the first time, desktop-published writings reflecting diverse and uncensored Asian American sensibilities were made widely available at reasonable prices.

However, though the political consciousness of generations of students has been raised through ethnic studies courses and through involvement in community activities, within the academy itself the emerging field known as Asian American studies has made little impact partly because several problems plagued the leftist outpourings of the 1970s. Unsympathetic critics dismissed the bulk of these writings out of hand as “mere rhetoric” and noted the lack of “fit” between the grandiose theories some authors propounded and the meager empirical evidence they used to substantiate their sweeping assertions. A great deal of the analyses of this period was indeed schematic, mechanistic, and deterministic. The emphasis on structural oppression or systemic victimization meant that Asian Americans were seen as mere cogs in a capitalist, racist system. To this day, Asian Americans remain faceless and nameless in most textbooks. When they appear at all, the tidbits of information included about them serve mainly an ornamental function—a token nod toward the nation’s “diversity.”

In contrast to the militant writings, several surveys or general histories published in the 1970s were more moderate in perspective. Also penned by writers of Asian ancestry, these overviews emphasized the contributions made by Asians to American history and society. Mountain of Gold by Betty Lee Sung (1967), A History of the Chinese in California by Thomas W. Chinn et al. (1969), Nisei: The Quiet Americans by Bill Hosokawa (1969), Japanese Americans by Harry H. L. Kitano (1969), The Challenge of the American Dream by Francis L. K. Hsu (1971), A History of Japanese in Hawaii by the United Japanese Society of Hawaii (1971), and East to America: A History of the Japanese in the United States by Robert A. Wilson and Bill Hosokawa (1980) all pleaded for inclusiveness. Their contributionist stance helped to keep old assimilationist assumptions alive.

The assimilation model managed to continue to hold sway even during a time of profound and pervasive social upheaval because it resonates so deeply with the American sense of nationhood. As Philip Gleason has pointed out, America’s national identity has been based not so much on such primordial sentiments as a shared ancestry, language, or religion as on a set of political values and practices. It is a peoplehood constructed primarily upon an ideological foundation. Since ideology can be learned and is mutable, native-born Americans assume that immigrants should be able to—indeed are morally obligated to—shed the political beliefs and cultural baggage they bring with them and to adopt the values and behavior befitting Americans.

The facile assumption that all immigrants can and should transform themselves overlooks the fact that people of color have encountered enormous hurdles—legal, political, social, and economic—whenever they have tried to enter mainstream society. Thus, before the assimilation model can be dismantled, scholars must demonstrate convincingly that American society has never been the egalitarian paradise it is said to be. A number of European American historians took up that revisionist task in the 1960s and 1970s. In place of broad sociological theories or ardent convictions based on personal experience, these historians assiduously sifted through the available documentary evidence to offer fresh interpretations of why Asians had been so maltreated in America. Roger Daniels, in The Politics of Prejudice (1962), emphasized the racist nature of the anti-Japanese movement and showed how even the California Progressives, who were supposed to be liberal and enlightened reformers, did not hesitate to “draw the color line.” Stuart Creighton Miller, in The Unwelcome Immigrant (1969), argued persuasively that anti-Chinese attitudes had not been confined to California and had, in fact, predated the arrival of Chinese on American soil. Alexander Saxton, in The Indispensable Enemy (1971), chronicled how the labor movement relied on anti-Chinese rhetoric and actions to consolidate itself. In The Heathen Chinese (1971), Robert McClellan argued that negative images of the Chinese were based on the “private needs” of European Americans and not on the realities of Chinese life. Delber L. McKee analyzed the draconian means used to implement the Chinese exclusion laws in Chinese Exclusion vs. the Open Door Policy, 1900-1906 (1977). John Modell showed in The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation (1977) how Japanese in Los Angeles, a city with a weak labor movement, managed to find a niche for themselves.

These studies, while small in number, are nevertheless significant for two reasons. First, with the exception of Sandmeyer’s 1939 book and Conroy’s 1953 work, they were the very first historical studies of Asians in America done by “real” historians. Second, the authors’ fine-grained analyses revealed clearly that the racism and class prejudice shown towards Asian immigrants and their American heirs were not temporary aberrations but were, rather, tendencies deeply embedded in the very social fabric of the United States. One indication of how much scholarly assumptions changed during this period is the fact that only one historical study published in these years, Bitter Strength by Gunther Barth (1964), faulted the Chinese for their own suffering.

Regardless of which conceptual frameworks various authors used, during the first three historiographical periods Asian immigrants and their American-born children were seldom portrayed as individuals with personalities, motives, or agency. To catch glimpses of the humanity of Asian Americans, one must turn to books containing their direct testimonies—primarily autobiographies. Among those available are When I Was a Boy in China by Yan Phou Lee (1887), two entries in The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans by Hamilton Holt (1906), My Life in China and America by Yung Wing (1909), the first Chinese to graduate from an American university (Yale, 1854), East Goes West by Younghill Kang (1937), Chinaman’s Chance: An Autobiography by No-Yong Park (1940), Father and Glorious Descendant by Pardee Lowe (1943), Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong (1945), America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan (1946), I Have Lived with the American People by Manuel Buaken (1948), Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone (1953), My Seventy-Nine Years in Hawaii by Chung Kim Ai (1960), Congressman from India by Dalip Singh Saund (1960), Journey to Washington by Daniel K. Inouye (1969), American in Disguise by Daniel I. Okimoto (1970), Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston (1973), Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America by Kazuo Ito (1973), And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps by John Tateishi (1984), Hanahana: An Oral History Anthology of Hawaii’s Working People edited by Michi Kodama-Nishimoto et al. (1984), Voices: A Filipino American Oral History (1984), Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives by James Freeman (1989), Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America by Mary Paik Lee (1990), Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America by Wela Usharatna (1993), Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America edited by Sucheng Chan (1994), and Filipino American Lives by Yen Le Espiritu (1995).

Unlike the noisy and combative shift from the assimilationist paradigm to one emphasizing oppression and victimization, the next change in analytical framework that occurred in the early 1980s has elicited little notice. The new element that has crept into historical studies of Asian Americans done in the last decade and a half is the concept of agency—a central idea in the new social history. Although most of the current generation of Asian American historians seldom make such a claim themselves, they are very much a part of the movement to write “history from below.” In the most recent studies, Asian immigrants (old and new) and their American-born progeny, as individuals and as members of groups, are depicted as people fully capable of weighing alternatives, making choices, asserting control over the circumstances they face, and helping to change the world in which they live. Like other social historians, the fundamental question that many of today’s Asian American historians ask is, “Is human action determined by economic forces and social conditioning or it is the result of human agency and subjectivity?” Most of them have not adopted either of the polar positions implied by this question. Instead, they tend to interpret evidence dialectically: on the one hand, they recognize that structures do limit the ability of individuals to act as subjects or agents in the making of their own history; on the other hand, they recognize that it is human action that creates those structures. Both agency and structure thus must be described and analyzed. Just as earlier studies that highlighted structure and ignored agency told only partial and simplistic stories, so attempts to privilege agency to the neglect of structural constraints are equally unsatisfactory, given the long and complex history of oppression that has haunted the Asian American past.

The best of the historical studies about Asian Americans produced in the last decade and a half are richly textured and subtly nuanced. They address issues in immigration, social, cultural, economic, labor, legal, political, regional/local, women’s, and family history. Not only has new evidence been unearthed and imaginatively interpreted, but new questions have also been asked of old evidence and timeworn conclusions. Each work has helped—to borrow the words of the pioneer British social historian, E. P. Thompson—to “rescue” a particular group of Asian Americans from “the enormous condescension of posterity” by restoring to members of that group a sense of their historicity. Slow and tedious as the research may be, today’s Asian American historians are finally according various segments of the Asian American population their rightful places in U.S. history. Cumulatively and persistently, the point is being made that the particular historical experiences of Asian Americans, however parochial or trivial they may seem to the academic gatekeepers in the historical profession, did and do matter in the larger story of the nation.

The turn toward social history in Asian American historical scholarship came with the publication of China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 1868-1911 by Shih-shan Henry Tsai (1983). By relying largely on Chinese-language sources, Tsai was able to present the Chinese point of view (or, at least, the point of view of Chinese diplomats and government officials) more cogently than any other scholar had done before or since. So, even though he himself considered his work to be a study of U.S. -Chinese diplomatic relations, his book is also an excellent social history that displays the aggressive efforts made by the Chinese to defend their human rights.

Two other studies also enlarge our understanding of Asian immigration: Imingaisha: Japanese Emigration Companies and Hawaii, 1894-1908 by Alan T. Moriyama (1985), and The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896-1910 by Wayne Patterson (1989). These books show clearly how socioeconomic and political forces interacted with individual ambition to promote the migration of Japanese and Koreans across the Pacific. An M.A. thesis, “Filipino Immigration to Hawaii” by Mary Dorita, made available in typescript in 1975, chronicled a similar process for Filipinos. Unfortunately, no comparable studies of Chinese or Asian Indian emigration have yet been done, so our knowledge of those two groups continues to be based largely on inference and conjecture. We do have, however, a fine book on how international politics affected the lives of Asian immigrants, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America by Joan Jensen (1988). As British colonial subjects, certain Indian immigrants in the United States and Canada who were active in efforts to free their homeland from colonial rule were subjected to extensive surveillance by British intelligence agents who relied on their American counterparts for help.

During the first period of their immigration, Asians entered the United States at multiple localities, and not just at San Francisco or New York, as commonly assumed. In Chinese in the Post-Civil War South (1984), Lucy M. Cohen, an anthropologist with a keen eye for historical details, discovered that a small number of Chinese had entered the American South via the Caribbean. These pioneers, along with several hundred Chinese brought to the South to build railroads, ended up working in cotton plantations and eventually dispersed into the local communities. Before they disappeared from the historical record, they left traces of their militance: they went on strike against employers who failed to pay them or to treat them equally as other workers.

Sandy Lydon uncovered yet another point of entry while doing research for Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Area (1985). He found evidence to suggest that some Chinese may have sailed in their own junks (ships) across the Pacific to Monterey Bay, settling in the region as fishermen specializing in the harvesting of shrimp and abalone. Combining information preserved in local newspapers and myriad other written sources with oral history interviews, Lydon has produced the best local history of a Chinese immigrant community to date.

The next two books to break new ground were written by self-taught historians. In This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910 (1986), Sucheng Chan, a social scientist turned historian, used information painstakingly collected from the unpublished schedules of several U.S. censuses of population and agriculture and from the archives of over forty counties to recover the long lost story of the crucial role that Chinese played in the development of California agriculture, the state’s most important economic enterprise. The methodologies of agricultural economics, economic history, cultural geography, historical anthropology, and historical sociology were used in combination to make this book the first multidisciplinary study in Asian American history.

The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (1988), by Yuji Ichioka, the most prolific Japanese American historian at work today, shows better than any other study the inner complexities of Asian immigrant communities—communities segmented by class, gender, and political and ideological differences. Using an impressive array of Japanese-language sources, Ichioka reveals how Issei workers not only experienced discrimination at the hands of European American employers and Japanese labor contractors due to their race and class status, but they also suffered from the cynical actions of the Japanese government.

A third self-trained Asian American historian is Him Mark Lai, an engineer by profession. Widely recognized as the dean of Chinese American history, Lai wrote his major work, a magisterial overview of Chinese American history, in Chinese but is presently translating portions of that book into English.

How the inner lives of Asian American communities intersected with the larger host society is covered in several studies: Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans by Karen I. Leonard (1992), Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982 by Valerie Matsumoto (1993), Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii by Eileen H. Tamura (1994), and ‘For the Sake of our Japanese Brethren’: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942 by Brian M. Hayashi (1995). The ethnic identities, assimilation, and acculturation discussed in these books are far more complicated and multidimensional than the monolithic, linear, unidirectional phenomena investigated by social scientists in an earlier era.

Since an overwhelming majority of the Asian immigrants who came in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were male workers, labor history is an important component of Asian American history. Edward D. Beechert’s Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (1985) set the pace with his detailed account of the many strikes—some of them multiethnic—in which Hawaii’s sugar plantation workers engaged. Although Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945 by Gary Y. Okihiro (1991) covers some of the same events as Beechert’s book, Okihiro adds a new dimension to the story. He persuasively argues that the anti-Japanese movement in Hawaii and the anti-labor stance of the islands’ sugar plantation owners arose from the same source: the desire by Hawaii’s ruling oligarchy to preserve its own racial and economic privileges. Moving halfway around the world, Renqiu Yu, in To Save China, to Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (1992), also demonstrates how race and class were intertwined. The traditional leaders of New York’s Chinatown did not hesitate to use coercive tactics made available by the Chinese exclusion laws to maintain their own elite position in the face of challenges from certain rebellious members of the community who wished to practice democratic principles. The most fully developed study in Asian American labor history is Chris Friday’s Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870-1942 (1994). With its breathtakingly-wide range of sources, this is the first book that links explicitly Asian American history and U.S. labor history. It demonstrates more clearly than does any other study the multiple, intersecting socioeconomic, interracial, and interethnic hierarchies that circumscribed the lives of Asian American workers while still allowing them some room to maneuver.

Revisionist complexity characterizes recent studies of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans as well. Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases by Peter Irons (1983) exposes the hypocrisy of government officials who deliberately concealed pertinent evidence from the U.S. Supreme Court. Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism by Richard Drinnon (1987) examines the career of the former director of the War Relocation Authority in a most critical (some would say, hostile) manner. Exile Within: The Schooling of Japanese Americans, 1941-1945 by Thomas James (1987) tells the ironic story of how Japanese American children were taught ideas about democracy while their families were denied the fundamental civil liberties that all Americans are supposed to enjoy; two-thirds of the incarcerated population, for example, were U.S.-born citizens. Sandra Taylor, in Jewel in the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz (1993), follows the trail of a group of Japanese Americans from the San Francisco Bay area as they journeyed to the camp established at Topaz, Utah, and eventually back to the “real world.” Yasuko I. Takezawa, an anthropologist, in Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity (1995), offers an ethnographic account of the redress movement in Seattle and analyzes how that effort affected the ethnic identity of its participants.

Compared to the above topics, Asian American women’s history is relatively undeveloped. The first book-length study, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Centuries of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (1986), was written not by an historian but by a sociologist, Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Combining oral history with sociological theory, Glenn places the individual experiences of her interviewees within the conceptual framework of international labor migration in a capitalist world-system. In Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship Among Japanese Americans (1985), Sylvia J. Yanagisako uses anthropological theory to explain how and why the same family relations can mean quite different things to different generations. Asian American women’s history made an important stride with the publication of Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Benson Tong (1994) and Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese American Women in San Francisco by Judy Yung (1995). Both studies are feminist in orientation. However, Tong, in his eagerness to demonstrate that even the most oppressed individuals possess agency, overstates the extent to which prostitutes were able to overcome the restrictive conditions under which they lived. Yung, meanwhile, deftly weaves vignettes from her own family history with interviews of women unrelated to herself to paint a collective portrait of Chinese American women during the first half of the twentieth century. These books represent the first steps in a long journey to recover the buried history of a “minority within a minority.”

Two well-crafted books in Asian American legal history underline the promise of this field. In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America by Charles J. McClain (1994) and Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law by Lucy E. Salyer (1995) both skillfully mine the voluminous legal records available to reveal the extraordinary sophistication with which the Chinese contested the exclusion laws over several decades. These studies in legal history, along with those in labor history, recuperate the history of Asian immigrants’ persistent resistance to oppression, in the process proving how well assimilated they in fact were, in terms of their understanding of democratic rights, their unchangeable physical features notwithstanding.

From the above review, it is obvious that many important gaps remain. The most glaring is the complete absence of any in-depth studies about the historical and current experiences of Filipino Americans. The first theoretical analysis of certain aspects of Filipino American history, The Philippine Temptation (1996), was written by a literary scholar, Epifanio San Juan, Jr. In contrast, several significant books have been written by sociologists about post-1965 Korean immigration and the tendency of Koreans to engage in small business: New Urban Immigrants: The Korean Community in New York City by Illsoo Kim (1981), Korean Immigrants in America: A Structural Analysis of Ethnic Confinement and Adhesive Adaptation by Won Moo Hurh and Kwang Chung Kim (1984), Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982 by Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich (1988), and On My Own: Korean Immigrants, Entrepreneurship, and Korean-Black Relations in Chicago and Los Angeles by In-Jin Yoon (1996). Studies about the refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia greatly outnumber those on contemporary immigration from China, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, and other Asian countries. Space limitation prevents me from discussing any of these works, most of them written by social scientists.

Finally, those who do not have the time or desire to read the books discussed in this essay can always peruse several works of synthesis: Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 by Roger Daniels (1988), Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans by Ronald Takaki (1989), Asian Americans: An Interpretive History by Sucheng Chan (1991), and Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture by Gary Y. Okihiro (1994). While each offers a shortcut to knowledge, readers who rely only on such overviews will miss tasting the veritable intellectual feast that Asian American history can now claim to offer.

Sucheng Chan is a social scientist and self-trained historian at the University of California-Berkeley. She is author of many books including This Bittersweet Soil (1986).