Unit Overview
This unit is an attempt to tell a history which occurred at the intersection of race, class, and industrial scale extractive economics. The major difficulty in constructing this unit is to weave together the narratives of white and Chinese immigrants to California in order to gain wealth and prosperity and the counter narrative of environmental destruction on an Industrial scale. Chinese immigrants are commonly included in history textbooks in their role building the Transcontinental Railroad. The part of the historical narrative that is usually left out is the broader story of Chinese participation in mining across the western USA both before and after their participation in the building of the railroads. The Gold Rush tends to be framed as a time of heroic, individual, white, male subjugation of the land in a quest for personal fortune. However, this unit argues that Chinese men ought to be part of this foundational myth, and that the myth itself needs to be revised to include the corporations which organized large scale mining, government laws which favored some groups over others, and the rapid adoption of industrial technology to exploit and destroy the landscape.
This unit explores the story of Chinese Immigration in 19th century California. In textbooks Chinese immigrants appear with respect to the building of the railroads but are often missing from the rest of the historical narrative. In this part of the course, students will examine the interaction between settlers in California from the 1840s to the 1880s. The content focuses on two settler groups: English speaking immigrants and Chinese immigrants. These immigrants arrived in a state which was already settled by Spanish-speaking Mexicans, and Amerindian populations (therefore Mexicans are not considered immigrants in this period). The dominant historical narrative of the California Gold Rush is from the perspective of English-speaking settlers (from the USA, the UK, Ireland, and Australia). This unit will also include the distinct but related experience of Chinese settlers who were drawn to the region to find their fortunes.
The main resource in California is the land. Mexican ranching was followed by mining, logging, and farming as the main sources of income in the state. All these industries have had long-term ramifications for the health of the land and people who live in the state. While much of the eastern US experienced gradual industrialization throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the Gold Rush brought industrial resource exploitation to California almost overnight.
Within ten years of the discovery of gold, rivers were clogged, and water supplies were compromised. Chinese labor was hired to carry out much of this damage. Chinese men, in the US without their families, were willing to accept low wages and dangerous working conditions. They were not the instigators of environmental destruction, but they were the labor who carried much of it out. Chinese laborers, like the landscape, were exploited by white investors and property owners without regard for their value beyond corporate profit.
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