Writing Westward Podcast
Episode 008
(View other episodes here)
Beth Lew-Williams
The Chinese Must Go:
Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America
Cambridge: MA. Harvard University Press, 2018
A conversation with Professor Beth Lew Williams and her award-winning 2018 book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Centered on a series of violent events and expulsions of Chinese from cities in California and the Pacific Northwest in the 1880s, Lew-Williams traces the longer Western histories of anti-Chinese racial violence, local and national immigration debates, international diplomacy, and formations of new conceptions of "citizen" and "alien" in the United States.
Beth Lew-Williams is an Assistant Professor and Philip and Beulah Rollins Bicentennial Preceptor in the Department of History at Princeton University. The Chinese Must Go recently won the 2019 Ray Allen Billington Prize and 2019 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, as well as the 2019 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era.
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Podcast Notes:
- Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is the Assistant Director of the Redd Center, an Assistant Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands.
- Podcast Music was written and recorded by local Provo composer by Micah Dahl Anderson.
- Episodes are recorded via Skype or in person and amateurishly engineered by Rensink.
- To submit a book to be considered for a podcast episode, email writingwestwardpodcast@byu.edu.