Everyone, welcome back. This is Week 2 of our Coursera course, and we're going to be exploring some themes in Asian-American history. In Week 1, we introduced you to some of the larger issues that we're going to be exploring in this course. This week, we're going to take a more focus look on what brought Asian-Americans to the United States. Last week as we talked about in the wake of the dramatic increase in anti-Asian violence during the recent COVID-19 outbreak, we feel it's more crucial than ever to understand the history of the contributions that Asian immigrants and then their descendants have made to the United States. Regardless of their place of birth or immigration and citizenship status, Asian-Americans out there know that at any moment you can face racist comments. Asking you to go back home or actually telling you to go back home when in fact, the US is your home. Ignorance in the long history of Asians in the US perpetuates the notion that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders are so-called forever foreign in their own home and thus subject to discrimination and even violence. This week we've gathered several resources for you to explore different moments in Asian-American history and to look at the various global trends, often referred to as the push-pull factors that have brought Asians to the United States. We're going to look at the long history of various Asian groups in the US and think about the struggles and challenges that they've endured and overcome since their arrival in the mid-19th century. Of course, just to put out that caveat, again, we wish that we could include all experiences because we value each experience of each group equally, but because this is just a very short introduction, we can't include all stories, but we're going to be hitting some of the major highlights. First, we're going to think about why study Asian-American history. Why study the history of any BIPOC group? How does the histories of different immigrant groups interact with the larger narratives that we talk about when we are teaching ourselves, our students, American history, US history, so how do the two histories interact? I'm going to then ask all of you, I'm a history professor. Max, I know you are an English lit professor and I wanted to just put it out there. You know that lots of people are afraid of history classes because you have these bad experiences with a teacher who made you memorize a whole host of lists of events and you had to take these scary tests about dates. We're not going to do that to you. Did you have that experience, Max? I am very bad at memorizing things so I can indeed speak to the horror of having to memorize timelines. Although I thought it was really interesting that you've chosen to include a couple of different timelines. It's not just about this one authoritative line through history with cross tabs on every important event, but overlaying palimpsests of histories and timelines that can be in conversation with each other, which I found to be really fascinating and probably a more accurate description of what traveling through history looks like, that there's not just this one line that you can get on a railroad and look out the windows on either side and see history go by. But it's more of a roller coaster. No. I even tell my students I will never test you on dates that aren't. It's in context. We are providing you these timelines like we provided you with data sets in the first week. It's to give you reference material, but also to just be able to explore and to see events in contexts and interacting with one another. That's really the beginning and that's a snapshot of Asian-American immigration. We're going to give you the big picture and then we're going to move on to talk about how Asian immigrants over time, so but from the beginning in the 19th century when Chinese immigrants came to work on the railroads, how they're faced with discriminatory laws and stereotypes like the Yellow Peril. We're going to talk about these challenges in historical contexts. Also, when we think about global factors, we're trying to talk about why people move, not just to the United States, but why are different groups constantly in flux and moving from their homeland to other places? What are the larger global forces such as capitalism wars that push and pull people across the globe? We're going to talk about them. We're also going to talk about how discriminatory legislation hurt the chances for Asian-Americans to succeed in the United States. We'll look at that and give you a bit of background on things such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, discriminatory law that was erected to prevent people from China, of Asian origin from participating fully in the US society. We really think about how citizenship and the lack there of changes your or limits a person's freedom and the different opportunities that they have when they move to the United States. After that, we will be looking at a case study, the tragic event of Japanese-American incarceration in World War II. We're going to be thinking about the different political and social forces that brought about this tragic event. We will be going into thinking about how in the post-war years, the 1965 Immigration Act, it changes the face of Asia-American and AAPI immigration to the United States. Then finally, we'll be looking at how 911 changed the way the United States legislated and dealt with immigration in the United States, and we'll talk about how Asian-Americans were influenced by this post-911 world, and that leads us back to the present day. This is just a very brief overview of the things that we'll be looking at. You'll meet more experts in our interview section, we have Professor Daryl Maeda from CU Boulder, Professor Chad Shomura from CU Denver, and Professor Faye Caronan from CU Denver at the end, and you are going to really enjoy those interviews. Really exciting week. You mentioned our differences, your historian perspective and my American literature perspective, and I found this week completely fascinating as an interpreter of culture and texts. I find the line from your discussion of the Yellow Peril and the stereotype with the unassimilable Asian. It really indirect conversation with what's going on in COVID-19 and representation of Asians and Asian-Americans in the consciousness and the relation between those metaphors of contagion with those longstanding racist stereotypes from Yellow Peril to Kong flu, I think is a pretty straight line, and so for me as somebody who sees the resonances of history and culture, I found it really fascinating. I don't know if you see, from the historian perspective, if you know what it feels like to see history repeating itself like that, but it was impactful to me. Well, I'm so glad that you thought you found that and I hope our learners will as well. I was just thinking about how for historians, nothing really looks new. You are exactly correct to see how these through lines occur and how the same tropes of foreignness of contagion, of disease, of the lack of recognition of what immigrants, not just Asian-American immigrants, but of all immigrants. That they're recruited here, they're brought here to provide labor, to help build the infrastructure of the nation from the 19th century to the present day, and yet, at any moment, the specter of racism and of these racist stereotypes are there. In moments of crisis, you see, again, it doesn't matter if you're a citizen or not. If your face looks certain way, you can be the victim of violence on the streets because you're seen as being foreign or not belonging or not having a place here. Again, for students, we always look at the specifics and the change over time specificity of the moment that we're looking at. But you can help but to see as you did, draw these links between the stereotypes of the past and the stereotypes and the forms of violence we're seeing in the presence. I hope our learners can explore, go through the materials that we've collected for you here, and really do a deeper dive into the history of Asian-Americans in the United States.
