People and groups in YPT: their beliefs, goals, actions, and significance.
Each appearance keeps its chapter context, including groups and unnamed speakers. Dates describe the episode or period, not a lifespan. One main lens organizes each entry; the explanation can connect it to more than one idea.
View
297 entries · Chronological view
Broad periods are approximate; entries spanning years are placed at the beginning of their period.
Before 1600
c. 1000 · Chapter 2
Thorvald Eiriksson and Leif Eiriksson
Norse brothers from Greenland. Leif reached North America around the year 1000, the first European to do so; Thorvald followed his directions.
Norse brothers from Greenland. Leif reached North America around the year 1000, the first European to do so; Thorvald followed his directions.
What did they believe?
That the new land was worth settling; after the bloodshed, that "there would always be terror and trouble from the people who lived there."
What did they want?
Land and a settlement they called Vinland.
What did they do?
Thorvald's men killed every Beothuk they met on the shore except one who escaped by boat; the Beothuk attacked the Norse camp in their sleep and Thorvald died of his wounds. The Vikings soon abandoned Vinland.
Why does it matter?
The book opens its history of contact with an encounter that ends in slaughter and retreat. The Viking ruins at Newfoundland were not found until 1960; unlike the Vikings, the Europeans who came five centuries later stayed.
Economic forces — a "good country" was wanted for settlement. Ideas are weapons — the first meeting is framed as strangers versus "the people who lived there."
Commander of the Spanish expedition that reached the Caribbean in 1492.
What did they believe?
That he had reached Asia.
What did they want?
A sea route to Asia and its wealth.
What did they do?
Bumped into lands unknown to Europeans, opening the way for Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and England; gave six captive Indians to the Spanish king and queen along with gold nuggets and parrots.
Why does it matter?
Takaki cites Columbus's captives as the start of a pattern: sea captains kidnapped Indians to display as curiosities in Europe, which shaped English opinion before any English colonist arrived.
Economic forces — the voyage was a search for trade wealth. Race is constructed — Native people are presented as specimens alongside parrots.
Elizabethan soldier and colonizer, one of the queen's chosen men in Ireland; a Protestant.
What did they believe?
That the Irish were savages and pagans, lacking manners, work habits, and any proper sense of private property; that only "fear and force" could teach them obedience.
What did they want?
Irish submission and Irish land.
What did they do?
Lined the path to his battlefield tent with the severed heads of slain Irish so visitors had to "pass through a lane of heads."
Why does it matter?
Takaki's most graphic example of the violence later repeated in America, often by English veterans of the Irish wars.
Ideas are weapons — "savage" and "pagan" license terror. Race is constructed — Christians are reclassified as non-Christians to rank them below the English.
England's monarch in the late sixteenth century, with the counselors who urged her to colonize Ireland.
What did they believe?
That Catholic Ireland was a security threat: Spain or France might use it as a base to attack England.
What did they want?
A subdued, English-controlled Ireland.
What did they do?
Encouraged her subjects to colonize the island and chose soldiers such as Gilbert and Raleigh to do it.
Why does it matter?
This is the "political" part of the Irish blueprint: conquest presented as self-defense against a threatening Other. The methods practiced in Ireland crossed the Atlantic with the same men.
Ideas are weapons — a threat narrative justifies expansion. Economic forces — conquest empties land the English then treat as available.
Elizabethan soldier and colonizer, chosen with Gilbert to subdue Ireland; later a promoter of American colonization.
What did they believe?
With Gilbert, that Irish Catholics were savages and pagans.
What did they want?
Conquest and settlement.
What did they do?
Served in the Irish wars that produced the two-level order of English over Irish: Irish forbidden English clothes and weapons on pain of death, barred from property, office, and juries, and forbidden to marry their colonizers.
Why does it matter?
The Irish social structure Takaki describes is the template for later colonial and racial law in America.
Race is constructed — rules, not nature, made Irish and English into unequal categories. Economic forces — property ownership reserved for colonizers.
Two sets of English colonizers. Barbados planters were businessmen who meant to make fortunes and go home; Virginia colonists brought families and meant to stay.
Two sets of English colonizers. Barbados planters were businessmen who meant to make fortunes and go home; Virginia colonists brought families and meant to stay.
What did they believe?
The Virginians believed a proper society was an English society, and English society was white.
What did they want?
Barbados wanted labor at any color: 20,000 enslaved Blacks by 1660, a Black majority. Virginia wanted to remain white.
What did they do?
Virginia kept its Black population tiny (2 percent in 1650, 5 percent in 1675) and filled its plantations with white indentured servants, three-quarters of all arrivals before 1700.
Why does it matter?
Takaki answers a puzzle: if labor was so scarce, why so few Africans? The desire for a white society delayed slavery until Bacon's Rebellion changed the elite's calculation.
Economic forces — Barbados chose profit; Virginia chose a labor system to fit a social vision, then reversed when the vision became dangerous. Race is constructed — "white society" was a goal, not a fact.
That Indians were "wild and savage people" who lived "like herds of deer in the forest."
What did they want?
To promote colonization.
What did they do?
Published the animal comparison the colonists carried with them.
Why does it matter?
The English saw the Americas through the Old World: Indian houses and customs reminded them of "the wild Irish," so the label transferred automatically.
Ideas are weapons — the animal image prepares readers to accept seizure. Race is constructed — an old label defines a new people before contact.
England's, Ireland's, and Germany's poor and outcast: convicts, the homeless and jobless, debtors. Some tricked, some kidnapped, some volunteers driven by desperation or the dream of a fresh start.
What did they believe?
That they had been tricked into coming to America once they saw that land was becoming impossible to get.
What did they want?
To finish their term, claim the fifty acres the law promised, and farm tobacco for themselves.
What did they do?
Wore iron collars, carried passes, took beatings; ran away with Black servants so often that the legislature complained of "English servants running away with Negroes"; formed interracial sexual partnerships punished by whipping and public shaming.
Why does it matter?
The land boom let the elite buy the best land and lengthen white indentures, creating an underclass of servants, slaves, and landless freemen of both races.
Economic forces — blocked access to land created the grievance. Race is constructed — before the law divided them, shared exploitation produced shared action.
English sea captain who sailed the New England coast in 1605.
What did they believe?
That Indians were curiosities to be collected.
What did they want?
Captives to display.
What did they do?
Lured Abenaki onto his ship and kidnapped three of them.
Why does it matter?
One of several accounts of kidnapping; another boasted of shipping "five savages, two canoes, with all their bows and arrows," and in 1611 a tall Indian was shown around London "for money as a monster."
Race is constructed — Native people are made into exhibits. Economic forces — captives were shown for money.
King of England when the Virginia Company founded Jamestown in 1607.
What did they believe?
That the Indians should be taught Christianity.
What did they want?
A colony that would "civilize" the savages, partly by taking Indian children to train them in English.
What did they do?
Supported the conversion plan in the 1606 Virginia Company contract.
Why does it matter?
The starting point of Week 5's question: the mission to civilize became, by 1629, a campaign to "root out" the Indians "from being any longer a people."
Ideas are weapons — the civilizing mission assumed English superiority and licensed control of Native families. Economic forces — tobacco later gave the colony a stronger motive than conversion.
Leader at Jamestown; later explorer of the New England coast (1616).
What did they believe?
That the colonists lived "expecting every hour the fury of the savages"; he called the Indians' 1622 attack a "massacre" by "cruel beasts."
What did they want?
Survival for the colony, then expansion.
What did they do?
Named the first year "the starving time" (only 38 of 120 colonists survived); reported Massachusetts as a "paradise" already "planted with corn, groves, mulberries, savage gardens."
Why does it matter?
Smith's own words undercut the savage label: the Powhatan rescued the starving English with food, and New England Indians were farmers. Takaki uses his reports as evidence against his conclusions.
Race is constructed — rescuers are called beasts. Economic forces — his New England report advertises farmland.
About fourteen thousand people in whose homeland Jamestown was planted; farmers who grew corn, lived in walled towns of bark and reed-mat buildings, made ceramic pottery and baskets fine enough to hold water.
About fourteen thousand people in whose homeland Jamestown was planted; farmers who grew corn, lived in walled towns of bark and reed-mat buildings, made ceramic pottery and baskets fine enough to hold water.
What did they believe?
At first, that friendship and cooperation with the newcomers were possible; later, that the English were determined to take their land.
What did they want?
To keep their fields and towns.
What did they do?
Fed the starving colonists; endured attacks, burned villages, and a governor's demand for yearly corn and deerskin tribute plus labor; killed about three hundred colonists in 1622 to drive the intruders out; were hunted on horseback, chased with dogs, starved, and poisoned.
Why does it matter?
Their cleared fields were exactly what tobacco planters wanted. Jamestown grew from 400 to 4,500 people between 1618 and 1623.
Economic forces — tobacco turned neighbors into obstacles. Race is constructed — an organized farming society was labeled savage. Ideas are weapons — their resistance was reframed as a reason to seize their land, "bought with English blood."
African captives brought to Virginia in 1619 on the English privateer White Lion and sold for supplies.
What did they believe?
Not recorded; Takaki gives us their legal position, not their words.
What did they want?
Their individual words and goals are not recorded here; do not invent a personal motive.
What did they do?
Were forcibly transported and sold. Early Virginia records show varied conditions of bondage and some later paths to freedom; a single fixed term cannot be assumed for every arrival.
Why does it matter?
Chapter 3 follows the development of hereditary racial slavery. The absence of a comprehensive slave code in 1619 did not mean these arrivals were free or that all had indenture contracts.
Race is socially constructed — lawmakers gradually attached lifelong, inherited bondage to African ancestry. Economic forces shape history — planters sought control over labor for profitable crops.
Leader of the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth in 1620; kept a diary.
What did they believe?
That "it pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness," killing more than 950 of every 1,000, and that God was "making room" for the settlers.
What did they want?
Land for his colony.
What did they do?
Recorded the epidemic as providence; his colony survived on corn taken from Indian graves on Cape Cod.
Why does it matter?
Less than 20 percent of New England was good farmland and Indians already held the best of it; disease let the English take it at first without fighting, and many towns were built on emptied Indian sites.
Ideas are weapons — a religious belief turns mass death into permission. Economic forces — the land was the point.
Signed a peace treaty in a Powhatan village, proposed a toast, and served poisoned wine that killed an estimated two hundred; his soldiers brought home parts of their heads as trophies.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's proof that by the 1620s the goal in Virginia had shifted from civilizing to destroying.
Ideas are weapons — the ceremony of peace is used as a weapon. Race is constructed — trophy-taking repeats the "lane of heads" from Ireland.
Three male servants captured after running away together; two white, one Black.
What did they believe?
That they could escape their masters together.
What did they want?
Freedom.
What did they do?
Each received thirty lashes. The white men got one year added to their indentures plus three years' labor for the colony; John Punch was sentenced to servitude for life.
Why does it matter?
The book's clearest single example of a court turning a racial label into a different legal future. Sale records confirm the pattern: whites sold for their "full term of time," Blacks sold "forever."
Race is constructed — same crime, same whip, different sentence, decided by classification. Economic forces — a lifetime of labor was worth more to the master than four extra years.
A ten-year-old Black girl sold by one Virginia colonist to another in 1653.
What did they believe?
Not recorded.
What did they want?
Not recorded.
What did they do?
Was sold along with any children she might bear, and their children, forever.
Why does it matter?
Hereditary bondage appears in a private sale eight years before the 1661 law allowed lifetime servitude for Blacks and sixteen years before the 1669 law defined a slave as property. Practice came first; law caught up.
Race is constructed — the claim on unborn descendants is what makes slavery a racial rather than a labor category. Economic forces — a child is priced as a generator of future labor.
Friend was an indentured servant in the early 1660s; the nine laborers were accused by a Virginia court in 1663 of plotting to overthrow the colony's government.
Friend was an indentured servant in the early 1660s; the nine laborers were accused by a Virginia court in 1663 of plotting to overthrow the colony's government.
What did they believe?
That freedom could be seized by force.
What did they want?
Freedom; Friend planned to band forty servants together, get weapons, and kill anyone who opposed them.
What did they do?
Both plots were discovered and crushed; several of the 1663 men were executed.
Why does it matter?
Evidence that the underclass was already "a disturbing element" before Bacon. In 1670 the legislature responded by restricting the vote to landowners while still requiring every white man to own a gun.
Economic forces — landless men with weapons and no vote are the elite's structural problem. Ideas are weapons — the idea of freedom organizes rebellion.
That Indians were "miserable savages" who worshipped the Devil, and that demons in Indian form encouraged witchcraft among colonists.
What did they want?
To frame war against the Indians as God's war.
What did they do?
Preached the Indian wars as a battle between God and the Devil.
Why does it matter?
Follows the Pequot War of 1637 (some seven hundred Pequot burned in their forts, including women and children) and King Philip's War, which nearly drove the English out before reinforcements killed and enslaved thousands.
Ideas are weapons — religious authority makes killing righteous. Race is constructed — a people is redefined as demons.
Black men, armed by white rebels, who joined the march on Jamestown; at the end, eighty Black men and twenty white men who refused to surrender when four hundred others accepted Captain Grantham's pardon.
Black men, armed by white rebels, who joined the march on Jamestown; at the end, eighty Black men and twenty white men who refused to surrender when four hundred others accepted Captain Grantham's pardon.
What did they believe?
That a promise of freedom from the colony's authorities was worth less than continued resistance.
What did they want?
Freedom from slavery and servitude.
What did they do?
Held out until captured by deceit and force; were returned to their masters.
Why does it matter?
The last stand is majority Black. Their alliance is the specific thing the planters designed the post-1676 slave code to prevent.
Race is constructed — the alliance shows the boundary was not yet fixed. Economic forces — both groups were fighting the same landholding class.
An officer of the English navy who arrived with Berkeley's reinforcements.
What did they believe?
That deception was an acceptable tool against rebels.
What did they want?
Surrender without a fight.
What did they do?
Told about four hundred rebels they were pardoned and freed from slavery; promised the holdouts safe retreat across the York River; lied. All were captured.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's point: a promise from authority was not the same as freedom. The lie foreshadows every broken treaty and repealed guarantee later in the book.
Ideas are weapons — a promise of freedom used as a trap.
Royal governor of Virginia and leader of the land-owning elite.
What did they believe?
That six of every seven Virginians were "Poore, Indebted, Discontented and Armed"; that freemen and debtors could not be trusted in battle and might join the enemy; that armed white freemen were more dangerous than hostile Indians.
What did they want?
To keep the elite's land, labor, and political control intact.
What did they do?
Declared Bacon a rebel and charged him with treason; fled Jamestown by ship when Bacon's five hundred marched on it; returned with an English naval squadron; had several dozen rebel leaders hanged.
Why does it matter?
Berkeley's fear is the chapter's hinge: an elite that fears its own white laborers will look for a labor force it can disarm by law.
Economic forces — his diagnosis is economic (poor, indebted) before it is racial. Ideas are weapons — "rebel" and "treason" turn a militia into a capital crime.
A Puritan woman captured by the Narragansett during King Philip's War; held eleven weeks; published her account in 1682.
What did they believe?
Officially, that her captors were "barbarous creatures," "merciless and cruel," and "hellhounds." Her own evidence said otherwise.
What did they want?
To return to white society and to tell her story.
What did they do?
Reported that the Indians treated her and her six-year-old daughter with kindness, were generous with one another, and that she never saw "one man, woman, or child" die of hunger among them.
Why does it matter?
Takaki calls this a missed chance: her testimony could have let the English see the humanity of the people whose land they were taking. They did not take the chance.
Ideas are weapons — testimony that could undermine a stereotype was ignored. Race is constructed — the label and the lived experience contradict each other in one book.
That the colony's government was failing to protect settlers from Indian attacks; that his expedition was a "glorious defense."
What did they want?
Indian land and Indian blood, and then, once branded a traitor, the overthrow of Berkeley's government.
What did they do?
Raised a volunteer militia without permission; killed members of a friendly tribe as well as hostile Susquehanna; marched five hundred armed men, including Black men given guns by whites, to Jamestown and burned it; died of disease before he could be hanged.
Why does it matter?
The largest uprising in any American colony before the Revolution — a class revolt that also targeted Native people. Takaki is careful: the interracial alliance was real, and so was Bacon's violence against Indians.
Economic forces — landless men wanted land; Indians had it. Race is constructed — Black and white rebels fought side by side, which is precisely what the elite then made impossible. Ideas are weapons — "glorious defense" versus "treason": two labels for one march.
The large landowners who controlled the legislature.
What did they believe?
That the social order would always be in danger as long as they depended on white labor.
What did they want?
A labor force that could not vote, could not own guns, and could not ally with white freemen.
What did they do?
Asked the king in 1681 to station royal soldiers to "prevent or suppress any Insurrection"; chose African slavery as the main labor system (Blacks rose from 5 percent of the population in 1675 to 25 percent by 1715 and over 40 percent by 1750); passed laws forbidding slaves to gather or travel, barring every Black person, free or enslaved, from bearing arms, outlawing interracial relationships, and making every mixed-race child a slave regardless of which parent was white or free.
Why does it matter?
"The Crossroads": the elite could have opened land and the vote to poor whites. It chose instead to reorganize society by class and race. Takaki calls the consequences tragic for centuries.
Economic forces — the choice protected short-term class interest. Race is constructed — this is the moment race is deliberately engineered as a political tool. Ideas are weapons — the promise of whiteness bought poor whites' loyalty.
Owners of 86 percent of Ireland by 1700, heirs of the conquest that began in the twelfth century.
What did they believe?
That their Irish estates should pay.
What did they want?
Profit from the British beef market.
What did they do?
Fenced farmers' fields for cattle pasture, threw peasants out of their homes (90 percent of farm laborers lost work), and during the Great Famine evicted tenants who could not pay rent and kept shipping beef and grain to Britain while the Irish ate seaweed and died. A million died of starvation and disease by 1855; the blight of 1845–54 rotted the potato crop year after year.
Why does it matter?
The push side of Irish migration: a million came between 1815 and 1845, one and a half million during the famine, two million more by 1900.
Economic forces — a profitable market displaces a people. Race is constructed — the Irish are treated as a conquered "Other" in their own country, the pattern Chapter 2 traced.
An enslaved African who gained an education and his freedom; author of an autobiography published in 1789; later an activist against the slave trade.
What did they believe?
That readers who saw the Middle Passage through a captive's eyes could not defend it.
What did they want?
An end to the slave trade.
What did they do?
Described capture, the march to the coast, the terror of the slave ship (he fainted on the deck), the stench below decks, and the fear that the white men would eat the captives, until "old slaves from the land" explained they were "not to be eaten, but to work."
Why does it matter?
Some historians think he may have been born in South Carolina rather than Africa; Takaki says even a partly fictionalized account describes horrors that millions felt.
Ideas are weapons — testimony as a tool of abolition; Takaki also models source judgment. Economic forces — the crew "tossed him up to see if he were sound," inspecting cargo.
A white settler's daughter, fifteen when Shawnee and French captors took her family from Indian land in Pennsylvania (1755–58); adopted by the Seneca; lived with them until her death near ninety.
A white settler's daughter, fifteen when Shawnee and French captors took her family from Indian land in Pennsylvania (1755–58); adopted by the Seneca; lived with them until her death near ninety.
What did they believe?
That she had been "very fortunate" to fall into the hands of her Seneca sisters, "kind good natured women... very tender and gentle toward me."
What did they want?
To stay. Given the choice, she never returned to white society.
What did they do?
Married a Delaware man (one son), then a Seneca man (six children), sided with the British in the Revolution, and told her life story to a minister when she was old.
Why does it matter?
Paired with Rowlandson to show "right and wrong, and also gentleness and violence, on both sides." Her family's presence on Indian land is the reason they were taken.
Race is constructed — a white captive becomes Seneca by adoption; belonging is made, not born. Ideas are weapons — her narrative contradicts the savage story from inside a captivity tale.
Lawyer, Virginia planter, author of the Declaration of Independence, governor of Virginia (1781), president.
What did they believe?
That Indians must be either civilized ("made to act like white people") or exterminated; that "wild beasts" and the "savages" who lived like them should vanish before "the advance of civilization."
What did they want?
Indian land, obtained without open theft.
What did they do?
Told the Kaskaskia in 1781 that whites and Indians were "both Americans, born in the same land"; wrote in 1776 that war should be pushed "into the heart of their country" until not one hostile Indian "remained on the face of the earth"; promised the Cherokee their lands were "your own... yours to keep or sell as you please" while planning to discourage hunting so forests would seem sellable and to extend credit at trading posts so debt would force land sales.
Why does it matter?
Jefferson is the bridge between the colonial chapters and Chapter 4's removal policy: the Founding Father who made dispossession a matter of arithmetic.
Economic forces — debt as a mechanism for land transfer. Ideas are weapons — the language of friendship and civilization covers a plan of removal. Race is constructed — Indians can be "one people with us" only by ceasing to be Indians.
Descendant of the Virginia planter class; slaveowner who bought, sold, and sometimes cruelly punished enslaved people; author of Notes on the State of Virginia; third president.
Descendant of the Virginia planter class; slaveowner who bought, sold, and sometimes cruelly punished enslaved people; author of Notes on the State of Virginia; third president.
What did they believe?
That slavery was immoral and should end gradually; that Blacks and whites were fundamentally different and Blacks inferior; that the races could not live together; that white prejudice and Black memory of injury would end "in the extermination of the one or the other race."
What did they want?
Abolition without integration: freed Blacks removed from America, ideally by taking children from their mothers, training them, and shipping them abroad, perhaps to Haiti.
What did they do?
Wrote in 1788 that he wished to see "an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery"; promised more than once to free his slaves once his debts were paid; died in debt, so they were never freed. Coined the image of holding "the wolf by the ears": "Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
Why does it matter?
A century after Bacon, the planters' descendant sees the trap the planters built and declares it too late to escape.
Economic forces — his debts kept his slaves enslaved. Ideas are weapons — belief in Black inferiority limited even the freedom he could imagine. Race is constructed — he treats a legal category as a biological gulf.
A Connecticut tribe petitioning the state government.
What did they believe?
That "the Times have turn'd everything Upside down."
What did they want?
Relief from hardship.
What did they do?
Described a past of plenty with no need to fight over land, and a present in which, even after adopting horses, cattle, and fenced lots, there was not enough, so that "poor Widows and Orphans Must be pushed one side and there they Must Set a Crying, Starving and die."
Why does it matter?
Takaki uses the message to state the chapter's economic verdict: progress for white Americans meant poverty for Native Americans.
Economic forces — track whose resources paid for whose progress. Ideas are weapons — the petition is Native testimony against the story of progress.
Most Chinese women who came in the early decades, often brought by force.
What did they believe?
Not recorded.
What did they want?
Freedom; many bought their way out of servitude.
What did they do?
Some sank into opium addiction or died of abuse and disease; others married and had children because Chinese women were so scarce.
Why does it matter?
The tongs that controlled prostitution also protected migrants; fongs (family and village groups) and clans ran clubhouses, temples, letter services, and shipped the dead home for burial.
Economic forces — scarcity created both exploitation and a way out. Race is constructed — a "colony of bachelors" was a legal creation, not a cultural preference.
Earlier Jewish immigrants who settled the Lower East Side in the early 1800s, dominated the garment industry, and were welcomed in American society.
What did they believe?
Not stated.
What did they want?
Not stated.
What did they do?
Built the industry the Russian Jews entered; together they made good machine-made clothing at moderate prices.
Why does it matter?
Takaki asks why Russian Jews were feared when German Jews were not: more different culturally, far more numerous, visibly successful, and involved in strikes.
Race is constructed — "Jew" meant one thing in 1850 and a threat in 1920; the category shifted with numbers and politics.
More than half of Irish immigrants were women (against 21 percent from southern Italy and 4 percent from Greece); by 1867 Irish women outnumbered Irish men in New York 117,000 to 87,000.
More than half of Irish immigrants were women (against 21 percent from southern Italy and 4 percent from Greece); by 1867 Irish women outnumbered Irish men in New York 117,000 to 87,000. They replaced Black women as the majority of New York's maids, cooks, and servants between 1830 and 1850.
What did they believe?
One former maid: "What I minded was the awful lonesomeness... It got to feel sort of crushing at last." Another, who chose the factory: "It's freedom that we want when the day's work is done."
What did they want?
Money, marriage, and self-sufficiency. In Ireland after 1815 one son inherited the farm, marriage required a dowry, and cottage weaving had collapsed; America offered husbands and wages.
What did they do?
Took live-in service for housing, meals, wages, and an inside look at middle-class America; worked in Lowell and Providence mills (a Lowell mill collapse and fire in 1860 killed 88 of 900 trapped workers); became a third of all US seamstresses and dressmakers by 1900. One wrote home, "No female that can handle a needle need be idle"; another, "this is a good place and a good country"; another to her younger sister, "it seems like a new life."
Why does it matter?
Takaki's argument that economic opportunity changed power inside families: a woman with wages did not need a father or husband.
Economic forces — wages buy independence. Race is constructed — Irish women's gains came partly by displacing Black women from the same jobs.
That America was "this plentiful Country where no man or woman ever hungered."
What did they want?
Food and security after famine Ireland.
What did they do?
Wrote to her father describing her new country.
Why does it matter?
One of three "shared dream" voices (with a Japanese poet and Russian Jewish singers) Takaki uses to show what minorities had in common despite conflict.
The Irish migrant laborers and the disappointed immigrant singer
Before the famine, men who left their cottages each spring for construction or farm work and returned in the fall with rent money sewn into their clothes; in America, the singer of a song about a letter promising gold on the street corners.
Before the famine, men who left their cottages each spring for construction or farm work and returned in the fall with rent money sewn into their clothes; in America, the singer of a song about a letter promising gold on the street corners.
What did they believe?
At home, that leaving Ireland was worse than enduring it. In America, that they had been "despised & kicked about," treated like dogs.
What did they want?
Enough to rent a potato plot; then, across the ocean, the gold the letter promised.
What did they do?
Built the National Road, the Erie Canal, and thousands of miles of railway; took the most hazardous jobs; died so often that "an Irishman is buried under every tie"; destroyed their lungs in Pennsylvania coal mines.
Why does it matter?
A Pennsylvania farmer watched the "immortal Irish brigade" grade the mountainside "good enough for an emperor." The emperor did not pay the funeral costs.
Economic forces — pulled by jobs, used as disposable labor. Race is constructed — wanted as workers, scorned as people.
The railroad workers (Chinese, Irish, Black, Japanese, Mexican)
Chinese laborers of the Central Pacific and Irish of the Union Pacific who met to complete the transcontinental railroad; Black, Japanese, and Mexican American track crews whose work songs Takaki quotes.
Chinese laborers of the Central Pacific and Irish of the Union Pacific who met to complete the transcontinental railroad; Black, Japanese, and Mexican American track crews whose work songs Takaki quotes.
What did they believe?
Their songs show pride ("I am a railroad worker... I alone remained") and grievance ("no sugar in your tay").
What did they want?
Wages; recognition for the hardest work in the country.
What did they do?
Built the rail network that moved people and goods across the continent.
Why does it matter?
Chapter 1 ends here to make the Master Narrative's omission concrete: the nation's greatest industrial achievement was built by the people the story leaves out.
Economic forces — railroads demanded cheap labor from every group. Race is constructed — different racial labels, one shared national history.
The Russian government and the Gentiles of the Pale
The tsarist state that confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement, barred them from owning land, and encouraged violence against them; the non-Jewish neighbors who carried out pogroms, and the few who "would save you."
The tsarist state that confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement, barred them from owning land, and encouraged violence against them; the non-Jewish neighbors who carried out pogroms, and the few who "would save you."
What did they believe?
That Jews were a problem to be contained.
What did they want?
Jews confined, impoverished, or gone.
What did they do?
Forced Jews into shtetls and crafts (almost 40 percent in manufacturing or crafts by 1879); staged pogroms "absolutely every year... before Pesach," destroying shops and synagogues.
Why does it matter?
Russian Jews came as political refugees and permanent settlers: only 3 percent ever returned, against 60 percent of southern Italians.
Economic forces — a land ban channels a people into trades and trapped competition. Race is constructed — Jewishness made a legal category with a geography. Ideas are weapons — state-sponsored hatred.
That the hiring-out system could be worked to his advantage.
What did they want?
Independence, and income.
What did they do?
Bought his time from his master for $250 a year in monthly installments, then hired seven or eight slaves to work for him.
Why does it matter?
Seventy thousand urban slaves worked in mills, furnaces, and tobacco factories in 1860; hired-out slaves paid their masters weekly. Hiring-out loosened the reins and taught slaves what freedom looked like.
Economic forces — slavery supplied industrial labor and rental income; a slave could be both property and employer. Race is constructed — legal status and economic role no longer match.
South Carolina senator who owned more than three hundred slaves.
What did they believe?
That masters had to "rely more and more on the power of fear."
What did they want?
"To continue Masters," which meant drawing "the rein tighter and tighter day by day."
What did they do?
Said out loud what discipline was for.
Why does it matter?
Masters combined occasional kindness, physical punishment, enforced illiteracy, and the teaching that slaves were inferior and could not care for themselves.
Economic forces — fear protects the labor supply. Race is constructed — inferiority had to be taught because it was not observed.
That "the lower class of Mexicans are docile, faithful, good servants... They have been 'peons' for generations. They will always remain so, as it is their natural condition."
What did they want?
Cheap, unprotesting labor.
What did they do?
Justified the dual wage system in the language of a plantation owner.
Why does it matter?
Takaki draws the line straight from Sambo to the peon.
Ideas are weapons — "natural condition" is an argument against raises. Race is constructed — servitude declared innate.
Nineteenth-century northern laborers competing for waiter and dock jobs.
What did they believe?
The Irish said Blacks "did not know their place" and should "go back to Africa." The Black worker said the Irish were "crowding themselves into every place of business and labor."
What did they want?
The same low-wage jobs.
What did they do?
Blamed each other rather than the employers who set the wages.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's first example of how competition for work produced racial hostility between two despised groups. The Irish, viewed as inferior by Protestant society, still competed as whites; in the South they did jobs too dangerous for valuable enslaved "property." Chapter 6 develops this fully.
Economic forces — job competition drives the conflict. Race is constructed — the Irish claim whiteness by distancing themselves from Blacks. Ideas are weapons — "go back to Africa" recruits others to exclusion.
Supplied Takaki with the phrase that names the book's alternative to the Master Narrative.
Why does it matter?
Takaki pairs Whitman with demographic data: a third of Americans trace ancestry outside Europe; in California and many big cities minorities are already the majority.
Ideas are weapons — a poet's phrase becomes a counter-story to "Americans are white."
Complained, "No one will employ me; white boys won't work with me."
Why does it matter?
In the 1850s nearly 90 percent of working Blacks in New York held menial jobs. Northern Blacks were barred from hotels and restaurants, seated at the back of theaters and churches, sent to inferior schools, confined to slums, given harder voting rules (property required in New York; Pennsylvania restricted the vote to white males in 1838), and attacked by mobs, as in Philadelphia in 1834.
Economic forces — abolition without access to work is not freedom. Race is constructed — New York wrote two sets of voting rules for two categories of men.
President, writing to a young Tennessee politician named Andrew Jackson.
What did they believe?
That Indians should sell their forests and become farmers like whites.
What did they want?
Indian land transferred through "civilization" rather than war.
What did they do?
Passed the policy to the man who would carry it out by force.
Why does it matter?
Takaki opens the chapter with the letter to show the line from Jefferson's debt-and-farming plan (Chapter 2) to Jackson's removal. The punch line: farming offered no protection; Choctaw and Cherokee farmers were removed anyway.
Ideas are weapons — "civilize them" was never a promise of safety. Economic forces — the forests were the point.
North Carolina-born lawyer, storekeeper, and land speculator in Nashville from 1787; general in the Indian wars; president from 1828.
What did they believe?
That Creeks were "savage bloodhounds" and "blood thirsty barbarians"; that Indians could not survive inside white society; that he was a good father to his "red children"; that removal was legal and morally right.
What did they want?
Indian land for white settlement and for himself, and a South free of independent tribal nations.
What did they do?
Bought 2,500 acres of former Chickasaw land for $100, sold half at once for $312 and the rest later for $5,000, after negotiating the treaty that opened it; killed most of eight hundred Creeks, including women and children, at Horseshoe Bend (1814), where his soldiers cut bridle reins from corpses and he sent the dead warriors' clothing to the ladies of Tennessee; backed Mississippi and Georgia in breaking federal treaties; ignored the Supreme Court's 1832 ruling that states had no authority over Indian territory; promised western land "as long as the grass grows, or water runs"; uprooted seventy thousand people and sent soldiers to move them west; praised railroads to Congress in 1831.
Why does it matter?
Jackson's personal fortune and the nation's cotton kingdom were built on the same land: Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were carved from Indian Territory.
Economic forces — speculation, cotton, and removal are one story. Ideas are weapons — the "good father" language covers soldiers and forced marches. Race is constructed — Creeks and Cherokees who farmed and governed themselves were still "savages" when their land was wanted.
The Californios (Spanish and Mexican settlers of California)
Settlers Spain began sending in 1769: a few of "Spanish blood" who got land grants and cattle, many poor people of mixed Indian and Black ancestry who became laborers.
Settlers Spain began sending in 1769: a few of "Spanish blood" who got land grants and cattle, many poor people of mixed Indian and Black ancestry who became laborers. About three thousand at Mexican independence in 1821.
What did they believe?
That Anglos could be neighbors: Mexico offered them land grants if they converted to Catholicism and naturalized.
What did they want?
To keep their ranchos.
What did they do?
Accepted the first Anglos; were outnumbered ten to one within a year of the Gold Rush.
Why does it matter?
Their story becomes Vallejo's story at chapter's end.
Race is constructed — Mexican California had its own hierarchy of blood and land; Anglo rule replaced it with a simpler one.
Born into slavery on Thomas Auld's Maryland plantation around 1818; mother enslaved, father white (possibly Auld); raised early by his Black grandparents; died 1895.
Born into slavery on Thomas Auld's Maryland plantation around 1818; mother enslaved, father white (possibly Auld); raised early by his Black grandparents; died 1895.
What did they believe?
That Blacks were Americans and would be absorbed into the American people; that the day he fought back against the slave-breaker Covey, he became a freeman in spirit.
What did they want?
To read, then to escape, then to end slavery and racism.
What did they do?
Learned to read from Sophia Auld until her husband forbade it, then from books and white playmates; saw free Blacks in Baltimore and resolved to be free; was sent at sixteen to the "slave breaker" Covey, was kicked, beaten, and whipped, and fought back; escaped in 1838 by ferry, train, and steamboat to Philadelphia and New York; became the abolitionist movement's most famous spokesman.
Why does it matter?
Takaki uses Douglass to show urban slavery's looser reins and the danger literacy posed to the system.
Ideas are weapons — literacy is the first weapon; Auld knew it. Race is constructed — a "slave" who is half white and fully American. Economic forces — Covey was a poor farmer whose trade was breaking other men's property.
Americans crossing into Mexican Tejas in the 1820s, many of them Southern slaveholders; by 1835 twenty thousand Americans to four thousand Mexicans.
What did they believe?
That Mexico's 1830 laws outlawing slavery and banning further American immigration did not apply to them.
What did they want?
New cotton land worked by enslaved labor.
What did they do?
Broke Mexican law, seized land without permission, entered as illegal aliens after 1830, and defied the antislavery law.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's first factor in the war: slavery. Texas was conquered by settlers before it was annexed by a government.
Economic forces — cotton land drives the migration. Race is constructed — American "illegal aliens" become the rightful owners; Mexicans become foreigners.
Thomas: Douglass's master and possibly his father. Hugh: Thomas's brother in Baltimore. Sophia: Hugh's wife.
What did they believe?
Hugh believed education "would spoil a slave." Sophia at first believed a bright boy should learn to read.
What did they want?
Hugh wanted an obedient slave; Thomas sent Douglass to Covey to be broken.
What did they do?
Sophia taught Douglass, then, after her husband's fury, snatched books from his hands. Thomas hired out Douglass to a slave-breaker.
Why does it matter?
Sophia's change is the chapter's small case study in how slavery deforms the master as well as the slave.
Ideas are weapons — the ban on reading proves that ideas threaten the system. Race is constructed — a woman who "seemed like a mother" is retrained to see property.
Born free in North Carolina in 1785 to an enslaved father and a free mother (he inherited her status); self-taught; sold old clothes in Boston.
What did they believe?
That Northern "freedom" was a pretense (Blacks were allowed only menial work like shining shoes); that slavery could be destroyed only through violence; that if slaves rose, it would be "kill or be killed."
What did they want?
The end of slavery and of Black degradation in the North.
What did they do?
Published Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). Southern lawmakers blocked its distribution; Northern white abolitionists criticized its strong language.
Why does it matter?
Takaki opens the chapter with Walker because he knew both worlds: slaves in the South, outcasts in the North.
Race is constructed — free or enslaved was decided by a rule about mothers, not by skin. Ideas are weapons — a pamphlet frightening enough to ban. Economic forces — even free Black labor is confined to the bottom of the market.
Mississippi farmers who grew corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and watermelons and shared food with neighbors in crop failures; by the early 1800s many raised cattle and pigs on enclosed farms, some grew cotton for sale, some owned Black slaves.
Mississippi farmers who grew corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and watermelons and shared food with neighbors in crop failures; by the early 1800s many raised cattle and pigs on enclosed farms, some grew cotton for sale, some owned Black slaves.
What did they believe?
That the land of their forefathers should not be sold: "It is the voice of a very large majority of the people here present not to sell."
What did they want?
To stay, and to govern themselves.
What did they do?
Refused the federal offer at Dancing Rabbit Creek and went home; the chiefs who remained signed under threat of state law and federal destruction, surrendering more than ten million acres. Those who took individual Mississippi land grants lost them to speculators' loans or squatters and went west anyway, crossing the Mississippi in a hard winter.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's proof that "becoming like whites" did not protect anyone: the government did not treat farming Choctaw as it treated white planters. Mississippi dissolved the Choctaw Nation's legal identity in 1830, nine months before the treaty.
Race is constructed — same farms, different treatment. Economic forces — loans secured by land titles converted owners into wanderers. Ideas are weapons — a signed treaty made coercion look like consent.
Born into slavery in Tennessee in 1813, son of the enslaved Cherry and a slaveowner; escaped to Canada at twenty-one after several attempts; settled in Syracuse, New York.
Born into slavery in Tennessee in 1813, son of the enslaved Cherry and a slaveowner; escaped to Canada at twenty-one after several attempts; settled in Syracuse, New York.
What did they believe?
That he valued his freedom "more than all the lives of all the slaveholders and tyrants under Heaven"; that apparent affection for a master could be a survival role.
What did they want?
Freedom for himself, his mother, and his siblings, and education for Black children.
What did they do?
Learned to read, opened several schools for Black children, became an abolitionist, and turned his home into an Underground Railroad station.
Why does it matter?
Takaki pairs Loguen's letter with the Sambo discussion: the "contented" slave who ran.
Ideas are weapons — his reply is a public demolition of the paternalist story. Economic forces — his brothers and sisters were sent to sugar and cotton fields.
Plains farmers and buffalo hunters of central Nebraska and northern Kansas; the hunt was sacred and kills were limited to what they could use.
What did they believe?
That the land and sky were boundless and that their identity depended on that.
What did they want?
To keep their homeland and their buffalo.
What did they do?
Entered the fur trade, which made hunting commercial; lost 60 percent of their people to smallpox (10,000 in 1830 to 4,000 in 1845); watched white hunters shoot buffalo from trains and carcasses rot along the tracks; were attacked by the Sioux, who had been pushed south by settlers and killed more than a hundred Pawnee at Massacre Canyon in 1873; most then retreated to a Kansas reservation.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's Plains case: railroads, corporate lobbying, settler complaints that the Pawnee held "some of the best land," and the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871 (no tribe to be recognized as an independent nation) together end the frontier.
Economic forces — railroads, fur, and settlement destroy the buffalo economy. Ideas are weapons — the 1853 editorial calls Indians, like horses, soon "merely traditional." Race is constructed — a people becomes a minority on land it held for thousands of years.
That the federal government must honor treaties guaranteeing Cherokee ownership and self-government.
What did they want?
To stay.
What did they do?
Led the majority in refusing removal; appealed to Washington; was thrown in jail by the Georgia militia so he could not organize opposition to the ratification meeting.
Why does it matter?
The Cherokee had done everything "civilization" asked: a newspaper, a written constitution, farms. None of it mattered against Georgia's land hunger.
Ideas are weapons — Ross argued law and treaty; the state answered by silencing the press and jailing him. Race is constructed — a sovereign nation reduced to "Indians."
American colonizer who brought three hundred families into Texas in the 1820s with Mexican permission.
What did they believe?
That conflict between "civilized white Americans" and the "mongrel Spanish-Indian and negro race" of Mexico was unavoidable; "War is our only recourse."
What did they want?
To "Americanize" Texas and bring it under the US flag.
What did they do?
Called for Americans to come with rifles.
Why does it matter?
The man Mexico trusted turns the colony into an army.
Ideas are weapons — a racial hierarchy recruits armed settlers. Race is constructed — "mongrel" is the label that makes conquest a duty.
An enslaved Virginian who had seemed humble, obedient, and well behaved.
What did they believe?
That a religious vision of Black and white spirits fighting, and a voice, commanded him to rise against his enemies "with their own weapons." He said he had no complaint about his master's treatment.
What did they want?
Freedom.
What did they do?
Led an uprising against slavery in Virginia in August 1831. The rebels killed dozens of white residents; the revolt was suppressed and Turner was executed.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's point: Turner may have fit the Sambo image, which means the image was a mask. Whites learned that a "good" slave could be planning their destruction.
Ideas are weapons — a vision mobilizes revolt; the Sambo mask protects the planner. Race is constructed — the role was performed, not innate.
Leader of the Cherokee minority who favored removal.
What did they believe?
That removal was coming regardless and the nation should get the best terms it could.
What did they want?
Compensation and survival.
What did they do?
Signed a treaty giving up Cherokee land for more than three million dollars.
Why does it matter?
The treaty required ratification by the whole tribe; only a tiny fraction attended and no tribal officers were present. Some federal officials called it a fraud. Jackson and Congress called it legal.
Ideas are weapons — a minority signature is labeled the nation's consent. Economic forces — a payment substitutes for a homeland.
The Alamo defenders, the Goliad prisoners, and the Lone Star Republic
Americans who began the 1836 uprising by barricading themselves in the Alamo; four hundred American prisoners executed at Goliad; the Texans who counterattacked under "Remember the Alamo!"
Americans who began the 1836 uprising by barricading themselves in the Alamo; four hundred American prisoners executed at Goliad; the Texans who counterattacked under "Remember the Alamo!"
What did they believe?
That Texas should be independent of Mexico.
What did they want?
An American Texas.
What did they do?
Most Alamo defenders died; the counterattack killed 630 Mexican soldiers and captured their leader; the victors declared the Lone Star Republic, which Mexico never recognized and the United States annexed in 1845. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations.
Why does it matter?
Annexation turned a settler revolt into a dispute between nations, focused on whether the border was the Rio Grande or the Nueces, 150 miles north.
Ideas are weapons — "Remember the Alamo" as mobilizing myth. Economic forces — the republic existed to protect slavery and land.
US Army general sent with seven thousand troops to remove the Cherokee.
What did they believe?
That his orders were lawful.
What did they want?
The Cherokee out of Georgia.
What did they do?
Rounded them up as prisoners in a violent, cruel process and marched them west in the winter of 1838–39. More than four thousand, nearly a fourth of the nation, died on the Trail of Tears.
Why does it matter?
The treaty "set loose thousands of white settlers" first; the army finished the job.
Economic forces — settlers' land hunger drove the timetable. Ideas are weapons — a fraudulent treaty gave a general legal cover.
Cherokee Baptist minister, missionary, and interpreter; grandson of John Stuart, a Scottish soldier who married a Cherokee woman and was named "Bushyhead" for his red curls.
Cherokee Baptist minister, missionary, and interpreter; grandson of John Stuart, a Scottish soldier who married a Cherokee woman and was named "Bushyhead" for his red curls.
What did they believe?
That removal was wrong; when it became unavoidable, that his duty was to bring his people through it.
What did they want?
His people's survival.
What did they do?
Led his family and about a thousand mostly Christian Cherokee on a six-month journey west; lost eighty-two, including his seventeen-year-old daughter, a better record than most bands; in Oklahoma served as a church elder and distributed government food.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's example of leadership from inside a catastrophe.
Ideas are weapons — a mission-school education and Christian faith became tools for organizing survival. Race is constructed — a Scottish-Cherokee family that is fully Cherokee by choice and community.
That American Blacks were their "equals and brothers"; that the Irish under Britain were slaves too.
What did they want?
Abolition.
What did they do?
Signed the petition.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's proof that Irish antiblack hostility in America was learned, not inherited: the same people held opposite views on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Race is constructed — attitudes change with circumstances. Economic forces — what changed was job competition.
The Bear Flag rebels and the US naval commander at Monterey
Armed frontiersmen who invaded the Sonoma home of General Vallejo on June 6, 1846, and raised a grizzly-bear flag; a US naval commander who then sailed into Monterey Bay and claimed California.
Armed frontiersmen who invaded the Sonoma home of General Vallejo on June 6, 1846, and raised a grizzly-bear flag; a US naval commander who then sailed into Monterey Bay and claimed California.
What did they believe?
That California was theirs to take.
What did they want?
An independent Bear Flag Republic, then US annexation.
What did they do?
"Arrested" Vallejo, his brother, and his Anglo brother-in-law; stole more than a thousand cattle and six hundred horses from Vallejo's estate while he was held.
Why does it matter?
To Mexicans the grizzly was a cattle thief; they called the rebels Los Osos, the bears.
Economic forces — the "republic" looted its first prisoner. Ideas are weapons — a flag turns theft into founding.
California-born member of the educated elite; owner of a vast estate near Sonoma; husband of the mother of his sixteen children; retired Mexican commander of the territory north of San Francisco.
California-born member of the educated elite; owner of a vast estate near Sonoma; husband of the mother of his sixteen children; retired Mexican commander of the territory north of San Francisco.
What did they believe?
That "the language now spoken in our country, the laws which govern us, the faces we encounter daily are those of the master of the land... He wishes his own well-being and not ours!"
What did they want?
To keep his land and to take part in the new state.
What did they do?
Offered his captors wine; returned two months later to a looted estate; fought one land claim to the US Supreme Court and won, but squatters drove off his laborers and burned his crops; sold pieces until 100,000 acres became 280; was elected to the California legislature in 1850 and donated land for a state capital.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's case study: a court victory that did not restore a livelihood.
Economic forces — formal title without effective control is worth nothing. Race is constructed — a native-born Californian becomes the conquered. Ideas are weapons — his curse names the conqueror's logic.
Commander of the American army in Mexico; occupied Mexico City in 1847.
What did they believe?
That his soldiers had "committed atrocities to make Heaven weep and every American of Christian morals blush for his country."
What did they want?
Victory, and apparently to record the shame of how it was won.
What did they do?
Admitted "murder, robbery and rape of mothers and daughters in the presence of tied-up males" along the Rio Grande; won the war that ended in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which took New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, parts of Colorado and Utah, and California for $15 million — with Texas, more than half of Mexico.
Why does it matter?
The same general who marched the Cherokee west in Chapter 4.
Economic forces — $15 million for half a country. Ideas are weapons — his own admission undercuts "triumph of a superior people."
That California's harbors would become centers of "an extensive and profitable commerce with China, and other countries of the East."
What did they want?
California, above all.
What did they do?
Told the public "War exists notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it"; told Congress the real prize was Pacific trade.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's second and third factors: China trade and Manifest Destiny. California also supplied cattle hides for New England's shoe factories and harbors for whalers and the navy.
Economic forces — the war is about markets and harbors. Ideas are weapons — the border dispute is the cover story.
A young captain in the US invasion of Mexico; later president.
What did they believe?
That what he saw in Matamoros was murder.
What did they want?
To record it.
What did they do?
Wrote that volunteers and "about all the Texans" thought it "perfectly right" to murder people of a conquered city "where the act can be covered by dark," and "how much they seem to enjoy acts of violence too!"
Why does it matter?
An insider's testimony against the glorious-war narrative.
Ideas are weapons — a soldier's letter contradicts the official story. Race is constructed — Mexicans could be murdered because they were the "inferior" people.
Californio who addressed the California state senate.
What did they believe?
That the conquered Mexicans had become "foreigners in their own land."
What did they want?
Recognition of a people who had not moved when the border did.
What did they do?
Gave the chapter its central phrase.
Why does it matter?
Mexicans had suffrage but no power: after the Gold Rush, 100,000 Anglos to 13,000 Mexicans in California; the 1850 Foreign Miners' Tax collected mainly from Spanish speakers, citizens included; Texas counties excluded Mexicans and Blacks from primaries and passed a poll tax.
Race is constructed — citizenship on paper, foreignness in practice. Economic forces — the tax was a tool to clear the goldfields of competitors.
The Senate that ratified the treaty; the Anglo-dominated court that decided New Mexico land claims from 1891.
What did they believe?
That Mexican titles should be proved in American courts rather than guaranteed by treaty.
What did they want?
The land available.
What did they do?
The Senate struck the treaty article guaranteeing property titles. The court confirmed about two million acres and rejected claims to more than thirty-three million; Anglos ended up with four-fifths of Mexican land. In California, grants failed for lack of instrument surveys "according to American rules," or fell to squatters.
Why does it matter?
The lesson plan phrase: courts, taxes, and laws as weapons of dispossession.
Race is constructed — institutions turn an ethnic boundary into unequal property rights. Economic forces — four-fifths of a people's land transferred by ruling.
Mostly young, illiterate or little-educated men from villages torn by war, rebellion, taxes, floods, and famine; 63,000 in the US by 1870 (29 percent of Idaho's population, 10 percent of Montana's, 9 percent of California's); about 400,000 crossed by 1930 and half stayed.
Mostly young, illiterate or little-educated men from villages torn by war, rebellion, taxes, floods, and famine; 63,000 in the US by 1870 (29 percent of Idaho's population, 10 percent of Montana's, 9 percent of California's); about 400,000 crossed by 1930 and half stayed.
What did they believe?
That California was Gam Saan, Gold Mountain; that they would return prosperous.
What did they want?
Gold, then wages: a laborer earned three to five dollars a month in China and thirty on the California railroad.
What did they do?
Left wives and families, worked the goldfields (two-thirds of them in the 1860s), paid the 1852 Foreign Miners' Tax of three dollars a month aimed at them alone (five million dollars by 1870, a quarter to half of California's revenue), then built the Central Pacific, blasting tunnels through Donner Summit and living under sixty-foot snowdrifts in the winter of 1866.
Why does it matter?
The 1790 Naturalization Act barred them from citizenship, so the tax on "foreigners who did not intend to become citizens" trapped them as foreigners forever.
Economic forces — push from China, pull of wages. Race is constructed — a tax and a naturalization law together manufacture a permanent outsider class.
Lawyers who took up to a quarter of a client's land as a fee; lenders charging high interest; banks that extended credit to Anglos but not Mexicans; squatters who settled on Mexican land and refused to leave.
Lawyers who took up to a quarter of a client's land as a fee; lenders charging high interest; banks that extended credit to Anglos but not Mexicans; squatters who settled on Mexican land and refused to leave.
What did they believe?
That Mexican unfamiliarity with American law and English was an opportunity.
What did they want?
The land.
What did they do?
Made winning as costly as losing: winners sold land to pay debts; in drought, Anglos borrowed to dig deeper wells and then bought out ruined Mexican ranchers.
Why does it matter?
A Santa Barbara old-timer: "The Spanish people had to live... they mortgaged their land to the Americanos. They got much of our lands."
Economic forces — credit access decides who survives a drought. Race is constructed — the same crisis produces unequal losses because the categories have unequal access.
The first, that "in a few years, like Indians, horses will be merely traditional." The second, asking "What shall we do with the Indians?", that they must live under white law or be "exterminated."
What did they want?
A West without Indians in it.
What did they do?
Put the choice — assimilate or die — into print as common sense.
Why does it matter?
Jefferson's civilize-or-exterminate logic (Chapter 2), now in a newspaper.
Ideas are weapons — inevitability is an argument for doing nothing to stop it. Race is constructed — whiteness set as the standard of survival.
That Chinese labor was cheaper and more reliable than white labor.
What did they want?
The railroad built at the lowest cost.
What did they do?
Told white workers who demanded he stop hiring Chinese that he would fire the whites instead; when the Chinese struck for equal wages, isolated them in the mountains and cut off their food until they returned after a week.
Why does it matter?
The employer plays two groups against each other and starves the one that organizes.
Economic forces — control of supplies is bargaining power. Race is constructed — Chinese workers are the "model" only until they ask for white wages.
Sheep herders of the Southwest since acquiring sheep from the Spanish; one of the tribes that rejected reorganization.
What did they believe?
That sheep and survival were the same; that herding carried family closeness and values between generations; that erosion was part of a cycle of drought, erosion, rain, and recovery, not overgrazing. They were right.
What did they want?
No outside "guardian" telling them what was best.
What did they do?
Refused Collier's plan; watched agents remove their goats and sheep; were reduced to temporary government wages; called stock reduction the most devastating event since the Long Walk. Later research confirmed drought, not overgrazing, caused the silt.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's demonstration that even benevolent policy imposed from outside is dispossession.
Ideas are weapons — Navajo knowledge was correct and powerless. Economic forces — productive resources removed, dependency produced.
At first, that white soldiers would refuse to serve alongside Black ones; later, that without Black soldiers "the war would have been lost."
What did they want?
To keep the United States unbroken.
What did they do?
Refused to enlist Black soldiers until the spring 1863 manpower crisis, then authorized it; 186,000 Black men served and a third were dead or missing by war's end. Issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863); the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery.
Why does it matter?
Takaki gives the war's Black soldiers credit that the Master Narrative usually reserves for Lincoln alone.
Economic forces — a manpower shortage, not a change of heart, opened the army. Race is constructed — Black soldiers proved the category "citizen" could expand.
Five percent of the Southern white population; owners of the large plantations.
What did they believe?
In their right to profit from slavery.
What did they want?
To keep that profit.
What did they do?
Dominated Southern politics and took their states out of the Union in 1861.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's answer to the aim question "who benefited": a small elite with outsized political power.
Economic forces — secession as the defense of an income stream. Race is constructed — the other 95 percent of whites fought for a system that enriched few of them.
Chin Gee Hee arrived in Washington Territory in 1862 and worked in a lumber mill; sent for his wife and got her a job in the mill cookhouse; their son Chin Lem, born 1875, is thought to be the first Chinese American born in Washington.
Chin Gee Hee arrived in Washington Territory in 1862 and worked in a lumber mill; sent for his wife and got her a job in the mill cookhouse; their son Chin Lem, born 1875, is thought to be the first Chinese American born in Washington.
What did they believe?
That a family could be built in America.
What did they want?
His wife beside him.
What did they do?
Beat the odds: in 1852 there were seven women among twelve thousand Chinese in California; by 1900 women were 5 percent of ninety thousand.
Why does it matter?
Chinese tradition, cost, temporary plans, frontier hardship, and white fear of a threat to a "white man's country" all kept women in China. The Exclusion Act then banned Chinese women along with laborers.
Race is constructed — a US-born son is a citizen his father can never be. Ideas are weapons — "white man's country" as an argument against families.
Irish immigrants competing with Blacks for jobs in a "country of the whites."
What did they believe?
That white workers should be chosen over Blacks; that Blacks should "go back to Africa."
What did they want?
Jobs, and acceptance as Americans by Protestants who despised them as Catholics and foreigners.
What did they do?
Showed their fellow whites they were hostile to Blacks; rioted in New York City for four days in July 1863 after Democratic politicians warned that Republicans would sacrifice Irish soldiers to free slaves who would "steal the work and the bread of the honest Irish." More than a hundred people died before an army regiment restored order.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's central move: identifying Blacks as "the other" was how the Irish assimilated.
Race is constructed — whiteness is claimed, performed, and rewarded. Economic forces — the claim is made over jobs. Ideas are weapons — politicians turn job fear into a mob.
Destroyed Navajo orchards and sheep herds in 1863; the Navajo surrendered and were marched to Bosque Redondo, the Long Walk. Five years later the government moved them back to a reservation in their homeland and gave them replacement sheep.
Why does it matter?
The Navajo remembered Carson when Collier came with new instructions; it is why they voted against reorganization.
Economic forces — destroying a livelihood enables removal. Ideas are weapons — memory of Carson shaped the response to Collier.
Pardoned the planters, who reclaimed their estates and forced their former slaves to work for them; federal troops seized the land, tore up the Black titles, and restored it to the planters.
Why does it matter?
"This ended the possibility of real freedom."
Economic forces — the state uses force to restore an ownership pattern. Race is constructed — pardon for planters, dispossession for freedmen.
Schools, the vote, and most of all land to support their families. Some said they would defend their acres with guns.
What did they do?
Became wage earners and sharecroppers working their former masters' land for a share of the crop, forced to buy from planter-owned stores, trapped in debt that never allowed them to buy land; became 41 percent of Birmingham's industrial workers by 1880 and 39 percent of Southern steelworkers thirty years later; steadily lost rights under Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement, and hundreds of lynchings a year.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's verdict: with the land question settled against them, "the possibility of real progress for blacks was sadly remote" by 1900.
Economic forces — landlessness plus debt reproduces dependence without slavery. Race is constructed — Jim Crow assigns a "Negro's place" in trains, theaters, hospitals, restaurants. Ideas are weapons — "Jim Crow," a minstrel character, names the legal order.
By military order set aside large sections of Georgia and South Carolina, giving forty thousand Black people titles to forty acres each, pending congressional approval.
Why does it matter?
The promise of "forty acres" was real for a few months.
Economic forces — the one moment land redistribution was tried.
The people of every chapter: the excluded who struggled for equality and respect.
What did they believe?
That they would overcome.
What did they want?
Equality and respect.
What did they do?
Won the abolition of slavery; the integration of the armed forces and public schools; naturalized citizenship for all immigrants regardless of race; the overturning of laws against interracial marriage; apologies to interned Japanese Americans; and "the awakening of America to its amazing diversity."
Why does it matter?
Takaki's answer to the second-semester question: the people America excluded compelled America to change, and "their struggle must continue."
Race is constructed — every victory listed is the undoing of a human-made rule. Ideas are weapons — a song sung across every movement in the book. Economic forces — the struggle that remains is the one civil rights law could not finish.
Black Kettle, Cheyenne chief killed and scalped at the Washita in 1868. Crazy Horse, leader of the Lakota and Cheyenne who destroyed Custer's command at the Little Big Horn in 1876.
What did they believe?
That their people had a right to their land and lives.
What did they want?
Survival.
What did they do?
Black Kettle died in a dawn attack on a sleeping camp; Crazy Horse won the most famous Native victory of the Plains wars.
Why does it matter?
Wounded Knee, fourteen years after the Little Big Horn, was in part the army's answer.
Ideas are weapons — Custer's death became a martyrdom story that fueled the last campaigns.
U.S. Army officer who served as a Union general during the Civil War and as a lieutenant colonel in the postwar campaigns against Native nations.
What did they believe?
That he loved the "free open plains" and would, if he were an Indian, choose them over "the confined limits of a reservation."
What did they want?
Victory and glory.
What did they do?
Surrounded a Cheyenne camp on the Washita River in the winter of 1868, attacked at dawn, killed more than a hundred men and captured fifty women and children, and marched back waving scalps, including Chief Black Kettle's. Eight years later he refused to surrender at the Little Big Horn and died with all his men, surrounded by Crazy Horse's Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.
Why does it matter?
Takaki notes the irony: the man who admired Indian freedom spent his career ending it.
Ideas are weapons — romantic admiration and extermination in the same man. Economic forces — the plains he loved were being cleared for settlement.
The strong central government established in 1868 after US warships forced Japan open in 1853 and Western powers carved up China.
What did they believe?
That only industrial and military strength would keep Japan from China's fate; later, that emigrant men with wives would not disgrace Japan the way the bachelor Chinese communities had.
What did they want?
Modernization, paid for by heavy taxes; orderly emigration.
What did they do?
Taxed farmers into selling their land in the 1880s; required girls as well as boys to attend school (English from 1876); regulated emigration and promoted the emigration of women.
Why does it matter?
Explains the biggest difference between Japanese and Chinese migration: by 1920 women were 46 percent of the Japanese in Hawaii and 35 percent in California against 5 percent of the Chinese.
Economic forces — taxation as the push; a state that manages its migrants. Race is constructed — Japan's leaders understood that reputation was a racial asset.
Americans who argued the Chinese should remain foreign laborers under white foremen forever.
What did they believe?
That "American" meant "white."
What did they want?
Chinese work without Chinese membership.
What did they do?
Articulated the position that Chapter 12 will call "demanding labor while rejecting people."
Why does it matter?
Others feared any large Chinese presence; both sides applied to the Chinese the labels already used for Blacks and Indians: savage, childlike, immoral, pagan.
Race is constructed — whiteness as the test of membership. Economic forces — a subordinate workforce is the goal.
Chinese individuals and merchants who "time and time again" took discrimination to court.
What did they believe?
That the law's promises could be enforced.
What did they want?
Civil rights.
What did they do?
Won some protections under the 1870 Civil Rights Act (equal rights to contract, testify, and be protected by law) and overturned the Foreign Miners' Tax; never won the right to naturalize.
Why does it matter?
Court victories did not stop the violence in the streets.
Ideas are weapons — rights claims as a tool the excluded could use. Race is constructed — the courts giveth and the courts taketh away.
Experienced farmers from China working white-owned land for half the proceeds; more than two-thirds of the farm workers in Sacramento, Solano, and Yuba counties by 1880.
Experienced farmers from China working white-owned land for half the proceeds; more than two-thirds of the farm workers in Sacramento, Solano, and Yuba counties by 1880.
What did they believe?
That their knowledge was worth sharing.
What did they want?
A living from the land.
What did they do?
Taught employers to plant, cultivate, and harvest orchards; built dams and irrigation that turned swampland into fields; helped shift California from wheat to fruit. Half the labor force in San Francisco's boot-and-shoe, woolen, cigar, and sewing industries was Chinese by 1870.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's evidence that Chinese contributed skill, not only cheap hands.
Economic forces — expertise builds an industry that then excludes its builders.
Jesse's children. Dennis left the reservation for Princeton and the 1849 Gold Rush, then returned as a Cherokee chief. Carrie, four years old on the Trail, attended a Cherokee girls' school and taught Cherokee children at the Baptist Mission until her death in 1909.
What did they believe?
That the Cherokee future would be built by educated Cherokee.
What did they want?
To lead and to teach.
What did they do?
Followed their father into leadership; Carrie was remembered by generations of students.
Why does it matter?
The chapter ends on continuity rather than disappearance: the "vanishing Indian" of the 1853 editorial did not vanish.
Ideas are weapons — education is turned from a tool of assimilation into a tool of Cherokee survival.
Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the 1870s; little experience with Indians, great confidence in technology and commerce.
What did they believe?
That his mission was to save the Indians until they were "ready to enter civilization"; in social engineering — scientific government management of Indian welfare "for their own good."
What did they want?
Peace bought rather than fought: no night attacks on camps, no shooting of women and children, but one or two giant reservations where Indians would work, learn industrial skills, attend school, and "do as they were told," with all land outside open to whites and Indians outside "fair game" for the army.
What did they do?
Designed the Peace Policy and the reservation system.
Why does it matter?
The humane alternative to Custer still cleared the continent.
Race is constructed — officials decide who is civilized enough to be free. Economic forces — the rescue plan opens land to settlers. Ideas are weapons — "for their own good" justifies confinement.
The Gaelic advocates and the immigrant who "left the old world behind"
Two kinds of Irish Americans: those who urged parents to teach Gaelic and keep the connection to Ireland, and one immigrant who said the second generation was "not interested in their ancestors... we are all American citizens and proud of it."
Two kinds of Irish Americans: those who urged parents to teach Gaelic and keep the connection to Ireland, and one immigrant who said the second generation was "not interested in their ancestors... we are all American citizens and proud of it."
What did they believe?
The first, that identity must be deliberately kept. The second, that Ireland's realities were best left behind.
What did they want?
Continuity versus a clean break.
What did they do?
Argued about what success was costing them.
Why does it matter?
Assimilation succeeds and unity frays; the same tension appears later among Jews and Japanese Americans.
Ideas are weapons — language and memory are tools for keeping a people a people.
Mayors, councilmen, and party bosses who by 1890 controlled most Democratic organizations in Northern cities.
What did they believe?
That votes should be repaid.
What did they want?
Power and patronage.
What did they do?
Rewarded Irish voters with jobs in police and fire departments, subways, ports, and city hall; steered public works contracts to Irish-owned construction firms; ethnic associations worked as job networks.
Why does it matter?
Takaki calls these "ethnic strategies" for rising from rags to riches — strategies unavailable to groups barred from citizenship or the ballot.
Economic forces — political access converted into economic advantage. Race is constructed — the strategy works only for a group classified as white.
That it was an outrage for "the scum of European society" to enjoy full privileges while "the Native Born American with wooly hair and dark complexion is made the Victim."
What did they want?
Recognition of Black Americans' prior claim.
What did they do?
Wrote the Black rejoinder to Irish hostility.
Why does it matter?
Both sides blamed the other; neither could see the employers and politicians who benefited.
Economic forces — job competition produces mutual resentment. Race is constructed — a Black American must argue that he is more American than a white immigrant.
An Irish immigrant in Poughkeepsie, New York, who worked as an unskilled laborer, then a junk dealer; his sons rose from postal clerk to superintendent of city streets and from grocery clerk to inspector of the waterworks.
An Irish immigrant in Poughkeepsie, New York, who worked as an unskilled laborer, then a junk dealer; his sons rose from postal clerk to superintendent of city streets and from grocery clerk to inspector of the waterworks.
What did they believe?
That the second generation would climb.
What did they want?
Public jobs.
What did they do?
Used the ladder that whiteness, citizenship, and the vote provided.
Why does it matter?
By 1900 only 19 percent of American-born Irish women were seamstresses or laundresses against 61 percent of immigrant Irish women; daughters became teachers, nurses, and secretaries.
Race is constructed — white immigrants could naturalize under the 1790 act; the Chinese could not, and Blacks were being stripped of the vote. Economic forces — city jobs were the payoff of political power.
The Crispins were Irish shoemakers' union, the largest labor organization in the country with fifty thousand members by 1870. The owner (unnamed) ran a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts.
What did they believe?
The Crispins believed united workers could win higher pay and an eight-hour day. The owner believed he could break them.
What did they want?
The Crispins wanted negotiation; the owner wanted production and profit.
What did they do?
The Crispins struck. The owner brought seventy-five Chinese workers from San Francisco, housed them in dormitories inside a locked and guarded yard, and within three months they produced more shoes than the strikers had. Strikers at nearby factories went back to work ten days later at a 10 percent pay cut. Newspapers called it a success; a magazine suggested Chinese labor as the solution to unions.
Why does it matter?
The mechanism of Chapter 1's Irish–Black hostility, now Irish–Chinese: the employer sets two groups against each other and pockets the difference.
Economic forces — replacement hiring shifts power to owners. Race is constructed — the Chinese are praised as "harder working" only while they are useful against the Irish. Ideas are weapons — the "model" Chinese worker is an idea aimed at the Irish.
The Lower East Side community and the landsmanshafts
Half a million Jews by 1905, in six- and seven-story tenements where half the families surveyed in 1908 slept three or more to a room; landsmanshafts, lodges of people from the same Russian town.
Half a million Jews by 1905, in six- and seven-story tenements where half the families surveyed in 1908 slept three or more to a room; landsmanshafts, lodges of people from the same Russian town.
What did they believe?
In energy, ambition, and mutual aid.
What did they want?
A living and a community.
What did they do?
Built bathhouses, delicatessens, cafés, theaters, synagogues; peddled buttons, bananas, matches; mostly worked in garments.
Why does it matter?
The organizational foundation for the strikes, like the Japanese temples and language schools of Chapter 10.
Economic forces — a ghetto that is also an industrial beehive. Ideas are weapons — networks before confrontation.
Born in Cork in 1837, emigrated at fourteen or fifteen to Canada and then the United States; schoolteacher and dressmaker; married George Jones, an ironworkers' union organizer; lost him and their four children to disease and her home and shop in the 1871 Chicago fire; became a labor organizer a lawyer called "the most dangerous woman in America."
What did they believe?
That "the prosperity he boasts of is the prosperity of the rich wrung from the poor"; that a white child sold to a manufacturer for $2 a week needed emancipation as much as the Black children sold "on the block" fifty years earlier.
What did they want?
Safer conditions, better pay, and an end to child labor in mines and mills, where children worked up to sixty hours a week.
What did they do?
Organized strikes and got strikers' wives and children to march; in 1903 led the Children's Crusade, about two hundred marchers, many of them child workers, from Philadelphia to Theodore Roosevelt's home at Oyster Bay under banners reading "We Want to Go to School, Not to the Mines!"; gave "The Wail of the Children" at Coney Island. Roosevelt would not meet her, but historians count the march an early step toward child labor laws.
Why does it matter?
The chapter ends with an Irish immigrant woman turning the labor movement's anger outward at employers rather than at other workers — the alternative to the draft riots.
Ideas are weapons — speeches and a march make exploitation visible and turn it into political pressure. Economic forces — she names who produces wealth and who keeps it.
Cowboys who taught Anglos roping, branding, and cattle handling; field workers in cotton since before Texan independence; ditch diggers using Spanish and Pueblo Indian irrigation techniques; the majority of the Texas and Mexican Railroad's workers in the 1880s and 4,500 Southern Pacific employees by 1900, living in boxcars with their families; miners.
What did they believe?
A 1910 Laredo newspaper: Mexicans "work as day laborers on what once belonged to them."
What did they want?
Wages and respect.
What did they do?
Became the mainstay of Southwestern labor in a system where rank was tied to race: Anglo foremen, Mexican cowhands; Anglos ran mine machines, Mexicans did hand labor; same work, lower pay.
Why does it matter?
"From landholders to laborers" is the chapter's arc.
Race is constructed — ancestry organizes workplace authority. Economic forces — a congressional investigation found the copper-mine wage gap was systematic discrimination.
Middlemen who rented space and machines, sold finished garments to manufacturers, and were paid by the piece.
What did they believe?
That speed was money.
What did they want?
Maximum pieces in minimum time.
What did they do?
Ran shops of under thirty workers where teams shared a group wage that drove everyone to speed up; workdays of eleven to fifteen hours; stitched fingers common. New York produced half its industrial output in clothing by 1910, an industry born of Civil War uniform sizing and the sewing and buttonhole machines.
Why does it matter?
One button-sewer: "While the morning was still dark I walked into a dark basement. And darkness met me when I turned out."
Economic forces — the payment system, not individual cruelty, sets the pace.
Unemployed white Californians, and the white men and women the Los Angeles Times reported in 1893 protesting that vineyardists and packers preferred Chinese workers.
Unemployed white Californians, and the white men and women the Los Angeles Times reported in 1893 protesting that vineyardists and packers preferred Chinese workers.
What did they believe?
That Chinese "stole" white jobs.
What did they want?
The Chinese gone.
What did they do?
Rioted; beat, shot, and loaded Chinese immigrants onto trains and shipped them out of town.
Why does it matter?
Violence drove thousands of Chinese into self-employment, above all laundries, which needed only a stove, a trough, drying space, a bed, and a sign.
Economic forces — hard times turn competition into riot; exclusion shapes the businesses the excluded can run. Race is constructed — the same worker praised in 1870 is a thief in 1893.
Companies planning western settlement around their business; one company lawyer explained what the 1871 act did.
What did they believe?
That Indians were obstacles.
What did they want?
Rights-of-way through land set aside for Indians and an end to tribal sovereignty.
What did they do?
Lobbied for the Indian Appropriation Act, which the lawyer said "destroyed the political existence of the tribes," letting the companies build across America.
Why does it matter?
Whites called all of this the progress of civilization; Indians called it a trail of death.
Economic forces — corporate interest writes federal law. Ideas are weapons — "progress" is the corporations' word.
The Hawaiian sugar planters and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association
American planters who expanded cane from 12,000 to 214,000 acres between 1875 and 1910; the HSPA that passed a 1904 resolution restricting skilled jobs to citizens or those eligible for citizenship.
American planters who expanded cane from 12,000 to 214,000 acres between 1875 and 1910; the HSPA that passed a 1904 resolution restricting skilled jobs to citizens or those eligible for citizenship.
What did they believe?
A manager: "Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities, and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes." An official: "pleasant surroundings... go a long way to make the worker healthier and more efficient."
What did they want?
A cheap, divided, controllable workforce.
What did they do?
Imported Koreans and Filipinos to pit against the Japanese; reserved skilled and supervisory jobs for whites (Asians could not naturalize, so "eligible for citizenship" meant white); had strike leaders arrested, hired scabs, evicted strikers, and spread propaganda that strikers were Japan's puppets out to "Japanise" Hawaii; bribed Pablo Manlapit; replaced barracks with family cottages when it paid; raised wages after each strike they "won."
Why does it matter?
"Divide and control" is the chapter's name for the strategy, and Pidgin, unions, and Nisei schooling are the workers' answers to it.
Economic forces — ethnic division protects employer power. Race is constructed — a citizenship rule becomes a job ceiling. Ideas are weapons — "foreign agents" as strikebreaking propaganda.
That "our experience in dealing with the weaker races—the Negroes and Indians—is not encouraging."
What did they want?
"Any suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores."
What did they do?
Gave presidential backing to exclusion three years before Congress passed it.
Why does it matter?
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred laborers for ten years and declared Chinese already here ineligible for citizenship; renewed 1892, made indefinite 1902. The Chinese were 0.002 percent of the population.
Ideas are weapons — a racial warning from the top makes law possible. Economic forces — depression and unemployment supplied the audience.
That allotment would "eventually open to settlement by white men the large tracts of land now belonging to the reservations, but not used by the Indians."
What did they want?
Reservation land available to whites.
What did they do?
Said so before the act passed.
Why does it matter?
Congress made six land grants to railroads through Indian land in 1886–87 and twenty-three more rights-of-way in the next two sessions.
Economic forces — the beneficiaries of "reform" were identified in advance.
Women who sold beds, chairs, and tables to pay for passage; a man who realized at departure, "This was the point at which I was cutting myself off from my past...
Women who sold beds, chairs, and tables to pay for passage; a man who realized at departure, "This was the point at which I was cutting myself off from my past... Would I ever see them again?"; families crammed into cattle carriers turned passenger boats.
What did they believe?
In the Promised Land: letters from America were read aloud in shops, markets, and synagogues, and children played at emigrating.
What did they want?
Freedom and a better life.
What did they do?
Sang Russian folk songs on deck; arrived educated (80 percent of men and 63 percent of women literate), poor, two-thirds skilled, nearly half women, a quarter children; stayed.
Why does it matter?
The dream of America circulated as a shared idea before anyone left.
Ideas are weapons — a possible future spreads through a community and moves it. Economic forces — furniture sold for a ticket.
Impoverished farmers, mostly young men, seized with "emigration fever"; about 200,000 went to Hawaii and 180,000 to the mainland between 1885 and 1924.
Impoverished farmers, mostly young men, seized with "emigration fever"; about 200,000 went to Hawaii and 180,000 to the mainland between 1885 and 1924.
What did they believe?
That "in America, money grew on trees"; one wrote, "Huge dreams of fortune / Go with me to foreign lands, / Across the ocean."
What did they want?
Wages: a Hawaii plantation laborer earned six times the Japanese rate and could save in three years what took ten at home.
What did they do?
Begged their parents to let them go; went.
Why does it matter?
Same push-pull as the Chinese and Irish, with a poem attached.
Economic forces — a wage gap makes an ocean look small.
Arrived in California in 1887; potato picker, labor contractor, then farmer; died in 1926 with an estate worth $15 million.
What did they believe?
That he had earned his place; he refused to move.
What did they want?
To farm and to live where he chose.
What did they do?
Leased and bought swampland in the Sacramento delta, drained it with dams and ditches, and shipped potatoes to San Francisco by his own steamboats and barges; bought a house near the Berkeley campus and stayed when a professor led protesters demanding he move to an "Oriental" neighborhood. The chancellor of Stanford and the mayor of San Francisco carried his casket.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's proof that wealth does not buy racial acceptance: the richest Japanese man in America was still told where to live.
Race is constructed — a millionaire is "Oriental" first. Economic forces — his fortune came from land the Alien Land Law would soon forbid. Ideas are weapons — a professor leads the mob.
That the tribal system had to be destroyed for Indians to be civilized; that communal land led to "savage habits and laziness"; that private property would make Indians independent and that white neighbors would teach them good work habits.
What did they want?
Indians turned into individual property owners and citizens.
What did they do?
Reversed Walker's policy: the president could divide reservations into allotments of up to 160 acres without tribal consent; "surplus" land was sold to whites, with the profits funding Indian education.
Why does it matter?
By 1933 Native peoples had lost about 60 percent of the 138 million acres they held when the act passed.
Race is constructed — a stereotype makes one system of ownership "savage." Economic forces — the act "gave Indians what they already owned" and took the rest. Ideas are weapons — reform as the language of dispossession.
Paiute prophet from Pyramid Lake, Nevada, who emerged in 1889.
What did they believe?
That if "all Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing," the buffalo would return, dead Indians would live again, and Native people would regain their lands in a world without whites.
What did they want?
The return of Indian ways.
What did they do?
Taught the Ghost Dance and the ghost shirt with blue and yellow lines; the vision spread "like a prairie fire" to the Sioux reservations.
Why does it matter?
A government agent at Pine Ridge wired Washington that Indians were "dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy. We need protection." The Indian Bureau ordered arrests.
Ideas are weapons — a shared vision answers the story of disappearance and mobilizes a people; the same vision frightens the government into massacre.
That what happened was murder: soldiers "followed them along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there."
What did they want?
The truth remembered.
What did they do?
Recalled about a hundred warriors against nearly five hundred soldiers with artillery on a ridge; women, children, and babies "scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away." Hundreds died; the soldiers buried them in a trench and stripped ghost shirts from the bodies as souvenirs. Many of the dead soldiers were hit by their own side.
Why does it matter?
The "tragic cost" of the triumph Turner celebrated.
Ideas are weapons — eyewitness testimony against the frontier myth. Race is constructed — souvenir-taking treats the dead as specimens.
Sioux chiefs the Indian Bureau ordered arrested in the winter of 1890.
What did they believe?
In the Ghost Dance, or at least in their people's right to it.
What did they want?
Big Foot wanted to escape with his people after Sitting Bull was killed.
What did they do?
Sitting Bull was shot dead by Indian police in a scuffle with his followers. Big Foot's band surrendered to the cavalry and was taken to a camp at Wounded Knee Creek.
Why does it matter?
Big Foot's people were being disarmed when a medicine man began the Ghost Dance, a shot rang out, and the soldiers opened fire on unarmed people.
Ideas are weapons — the arrests were ordered because a dance was seen as rebellion.
That the Indians "had hardly used" the land and "did not need it."
What did they want?
To reassure critics.
What did they do?
Calculated that in 1891 alone one-seventh of all Indian land was sold to non-Indians.
Why does it matter?
In 1902 Congress required that a dead allottee's land be sold at auction rather than inherited; an official assured Theodore Roosevelt that in "a few years at most" all Indian land would belong to settlers.
Economic forces — measure the transfer, not the promise. Ideas are weapons — "they did not need it" is the oldest excuse in the book (Chapter 2).
Historian who published "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" in 1893, two years after the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed.
Historian who published "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" in 1893, two years after the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed.
What did they believe?
That the frontier was "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" and that conquering it made Americans strong, self-reliant, and unique.
What did they want?
To explain what made America America.
What did they do?
Gave the Master Narrative its scholarly foundation: settlement by Europeans, Indians overcome as a necessary stage of civilization.
Why does it matter?
Takaki sets Turner's thesis beside the massacre at Wounded Knee the year before the frontier "closed."
Ideas are weapons — a heroic origin story makes conquest inevitable and therefore blameless. Race is constructed — "savagery" is a location on Turner's map, and Indians live there.
Two picture brides. Miyasaki's wish to go abroad spread through her town and "requests for marriage came pouring in just like rain." Orite was engaged at sixteen and met her husband, about thirty, at almost eighteen after seeing only his photograph; her name was entered in the Orite family register, "thus we were married."
What did they believe?
Orite: "Being young, I was unromantic. I just believed that girls should get married."
What did they want?
To go to a foreign land; to do what girls did.
What did they do?
Crossed the Pacific and met their husbands the day they landed.
Why does it matter?
Marriage and emigration happened together for thousands of women.
Economic forces — a photograph and a family register moved labor across an ocean. Race is constructed — the Gentlemen's Agreement decided who could form a family in America.
The American-born generation: 11 percent of Chinese in America in 1900, 41 percent in 1930, 52 percent in 1940. One resident remembered "babies were looked on with a kind of wonder"; one man remembered being tied to his mother's back while she ran a garment-shop sewing machine; Victor Wong called his generation "a 'marginal man,' caught between two cultures."
What did they believe?
Parents believed education would give their children better lives. Children wanted more independence than traditional parents allowed.
What did they want?
To be loyal to their parents and to fit into America.
What did they do?
Studied; argued endlessly about "the dilemma of being caught in between"; became the citizens their parents could not be.
Why does it matter?
Forty percent of all Chinese in America lived in San Francisco and New York by 1940.
Ideas are weapons — a belief in education directs a generation's effort. Race is constructed — citizens by birth, "marginal" by treatment.
That a Mexican's "strongest point with his employers is his willingness to work for a low wage."
What did they want?
Cheap labor for the railroads.
What did they do?
Put the chapter's contradiction in one sentence.
Why does it matter?
Three-quarters of Texas construction workers were Mexican by 1928, all in manual jobs; skilled and supervisory positions were white. In cities Mexicans worked garments, canneries, janitorial and gardening jobs, "not in banks and offices." California growers turned to Mexicans after Asian exclusion: two-thirds of the state's 200,000 farm laborers in the 1920s, 85 percent of Texas's.
Economic forces — the welcome has a price condition. Race is constructed — a wage tier as a racial tier.
Immigrants from farming families who moved from field hands, railroad crews, and canneries to sharecropping, renting, and owning land.
What did they believe?
That farming in America was their dream and that success would win acceptance.
What did they want?
Land.
What did they do?
Grew from 29 farms and 4,698 acres in 1900 to nearly half a million acres by 1920, producing large shares of California's strawberries, onions, tomatoes, celery, snap beans, and green peas, worth $67 million, about 10 percent of the state's crops; turned the Sacramento Valley dust and Imperial Valley desert into orchards. Women did fieldwork and housework both.
Why does it matter?
They arrived as cities, irrigation, railroads, and refrigerated cars created a national market for fresh produce. Their success provoked the Alien Land Law.
Economic forces — new markets and technology plus knowledge and labor. Race is constructed — success triggered exclusion because America was "meant to be white."
Uprooted rural families and turned peasants into exploited tenants and sharecroppers; the cities offered only boom-and-bust industrial work.
Why does it matter?
The push side, like Irish landlords and Japanese tax collectors. The 1895 Eagle Pass–Durango railroad then made the trip easy: a 1904 Mexican newspaper reported daily trains "full of Mexican men... going in gangs to work on railroad lines."
Economic forces — land concentration at home plus a rail line equals mass migration.
Field bosses (lunas), often on horseback, who called workers by the number on the brass bango disk around each neck; gangs of twenty to thirty marched out at the siren; women (14 percent of the workforce in 1920, mostly Japanese) paid 55 cents a day to men's 78 for the same tasks.
What did they believe?
One laborer: "If we talked too much the man swung his whip... just swung his whip so that we would work harder."
What did they want?
Their names back; a woman's song: "With sweat and tears we both work / For our means."
What did they do?
Hoed in silent lines, cut twelve-foot cane with machetes, breathed red dust, loaded railcars, worked the mill's heat and clank.
Why does it matter?
"Names had connected these men and women to family and community, but in the cane fields they became numbers."
Economic forces — the bango is labor accounting. Race is constructed — a number replaces a name.
That whites do not understand the Indian because they do not understand America; that "the man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien."
What did they want?
Recognition that Native people are the original Americans, not obstacles to "progress."
What did they do?
Turned the colonizers' own vocabulary of belonging back on them.
Why does it matter?
Takaki sets him against the Master Narrative's honoring of soldiers who fought Indians as heroes.
Ideas are weapons — a competing definition of who is foreign challenges the story that justified conquest. Race is constructed — "savage" was a label, not a description.
An unnamed immigrant writing to a Jewish newspaper.
What did they believe?
That her daughter had forgotten Yiddish and now called her a greenhorn.
What did they want?
Her daughter back.
What did they do?
Documented assimilation from the losing side.
Why does it matter?
Greenhorns changed clothes (hats for caps, shirtwaists for shawls), names (Bochlowitz to Buckley, Rivka to Ruth), holidays (Christmas presents), vacations (the Catskills), and withdrew wives from work as a mark of success.
Ideas are weapons — language as the marker of belonging; the same tension as the Irish Gaelic debate.
Poor Mexican Americans in ethnic islands of shacks without sidewalks, bound by ethnicity and class; also the Puerto Ricans of Spanish Harlem (El Barrio) from the 1920s and their US-born Nuyorican children and grandchildren.
Poor Mexican Americans in ethnic islands of shacks without sidewalks, bound by ethnicity and class; also the Puerto Ricans of Spanish Harlem (El Barrio) from the 1920s and their US-born Nuyorican children and grandchildren.
What did they believe?
In asistencia: help given on trust, to be repaid someday, not charity.
What did they want?
A place where they were not strangers.
What did they do?
Shared job information, food, and shelter with newcomers; celebrated Mexican holidays under both flags; sat outside in the evening talking of Mexico and of American racism; stayed.
Why does it matter?
The barrio as the mutualista's neighborhood form.
Economic forces — a survival network where institutions refuse. Ideas are weapons — mutual obligation as a working principle. Race is constructed — the tracks divide the town by category.
An unnamed woman leaving for America; her brother-in-law told her to come back in five years, and her father answered, "Are you kidding? They can't learn anything in five years. They'll even have a baby over there. Be patient for twenty years."
What did they believe?
She believed the separation would be short. Her father knew better.
What did they want?
To go, and to come home.
What did they do?
Left. The chapter ends with two more picture brides, Ai Miyasaki and Riyo Orite.
Why does it matter?
About sixty thousand women entered under the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement, which let immigrants bring family; many were picture brides matched through go-betweens and exchanged photographs.
Economic forces — twenty years is the father's estimate of what it takes to build something. Race is constructed — a loophole in a racial law decided which families could exist.
A couple who emigrated together in 1900 to work on Maui and decided in 1920 to take their Hawaiian-born children back to Japan; their teenage son refused.
A couple who emigrated together in 1900 to work on Maui and decided in 1920 to take their Hawaiian-born children back to Japan; their teenage son refused.
What did they believe?
The son believed Hawaii was his home, the only world he knew.
What did they want?
The parents wanted Japan; the son wanted the family to stay.
What did they do?
Stayed.
Why does it matter?
The second generation refused plantation labor too: education, they believed, was the way off the plantation, while planters thought sixth or eighth grade was plenty.
Ideas are weapons — American ideals of democracy and equality, learned in school, gave Nisei a standard for judging the plantation's whites-on-top order.
That "educated Mexicans are the hardest to handle... They make more desirable citizens if they would stop about the seventh grade"; that if every Mexican finished high school no one would pick beets.
What did they want?
The schools to reproduce the labor force.
What did they do?
Kept education short.
Why does it matter?
Same logic as the Hawaiian planters in Chapter 10.
Economic forces — schooling capped to protect a labor supply. Ideas are weapons — "desirable citizen" redefined as compliant worker.
African American writer, a sharecropper's daughter.
What did they believe?
That the migration was a force of nature: "The wind said North. Trains said North... men moved like the great herds before the glaciers."
What did they want?
To capture the spirit of leaving.
What did they do?
Wrote the passage that opens the chapter.
Why does it matter?
Between 1910 and 1920 Detroit's Black population went from 5,700 to 40,800, Cleveland's from 8,400 to 34,400, Chicago's from 44,000 to 109,400, New York's from 91,700 to 152,400.
Ideas are weapons — a writer's image gives a mass movement its meaning.
The Arizona miners of 1903 and 1915 and the mine owners
3,500 miners, 80 percent Mexican, who struck in 1903 for equal wages, an eight-hour day, and free hospitalization; five thousand who struck for nineteen weeks in 1915.
3,500 miners, 80 percent Mexican, who struck in 1903 for equal wages, an eight-hour day, and free hospitalization; five thousand who struck for nineteen weeks in 1915. The owners sealed the mines and told workers to "go back to Mexico."
What did they believe?
That Mexicans deserved the wages Anglos got.
What did they want?
Equality on the job.
What did they do?
Shut the mines in 1903 until floods destroyed their homes and leaders were jailed for inciting a riot; in 1915 endured hundreds of arrests and won wage increases.
Why does it matter?
Musicians, merchants, and the mutualistas sustained the strikers.
Economic forces — collective action shifts wages. Ideas are weapons — "go back to Mexico" aimed at US-born miners.
That the 1868 treaty required the whole tribe's approval for any deal involving tribal land.
What did they want?
The treaty honored.
What did they do?
Lost in the US Supreme Court, which ruled the federal government could change or cancel any provision of an Indian treaty. An Indian Affairs official said that without the ruling it might have taken fifty years to get rid of the reservations.
Why does it matter?
The court did to treaties what the Senate had done to Guadalupe Hidalgo (Chapter 7): erased the guarantee.
Ideas are weapons — Lone Wolf used the law; the court declared the law optional. Race is constructed — a "nation" whose treaties bind only one side.
The Japanese Mexican Labor Association and its Mexican secretary
Mexican and Japanese farm workers who struck together at Oxnard, California, in 1903 against wage cuts and formed the JMLA, meeting in Japanese, Spanish, and English.
Mexican and Japanese farm workers who struck together at Oxnard, California, in 1903 against wage cuts and formed the JMLA, meeting in Japanese, Spanish, and English.
What did they believe?
That "our Japanese brothers here were the first to recognize the importance of cooperating and uniting in demanding a fair wage scale"; that they would accept no charter except one that would "wipe out race prejudice and recognize our fellow workers as being as good as ourselves."
What did they want?
Fair wages, and AFL affiliation on equal terms.
What did they do?
Refused the AFL president's offer to admit Mexicans but not Japanese or Chinese; the union died within a few years without AFL support.
Why does it matter?
The first union of two minority groups in California history, and the 1903 strike named in Chapter 1.
Ideas are weapons — equality made a condition of solidarity. Economic forces — shared class interest across an ethnic line. Race is constructed — the AFL tried to draw the line; the workers refused it.
Mexican and Japanese farm laborers, 1903; Japanese and Filipino laborers, 1920; the CIO, 1930s
Workers who struck together across ethnic lines in California and Hawaii, and the Committee for Industrial Organization, whose charter called for "absolute racial equality in Union membership."
Workers who struck together across ethnic lines in California and Hawaii, and the Committee for Industrial Organization, whose charter called for "absolute racial equality in Union membership."
What did they believe?
That exploitation was a shared condition and unity was the answer.
What did they want?
Better pay and conditions.
What did they do?
Organized joint strikes and multiracial unions.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's counterweight to the Irish–Black conflict: differences "do not have to keep people apart." The 1903 Oxnard strike returns in Chapter 12.
Economic forces — shared economic interest produces cooperation. Ideas are weapons — a principle of racial equality is used to organize rather than divide.
Laundrymen, restaurant owners, and other laborers who passed themselves off as merchants (whose families could enter), and men who, after the April 18, 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed San Francisco's records, claimed to have been born in the city.
Laundrymen, restaurant owners, and other laborers who passed themselves off as merchants (whose families could enter), and men who, after the April 18, 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed San Francisco's records, claimed to have been born in the city.
What did they believe?
That the law's loopholes were the only way to bring wives and children.
What did they want?
Families.
What did they do?
Claimed birthright citizenship that could not be disproved; as citizens they could bring wives and children. Between 1910 and 1924 one Chinese immigrant in four was female, against one in twenty before 1900.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's point: birthright citizenship and naturalization were different rules; a natural disaster opened the one door exclusion had left.
Race is constructed — the same Chinese man is an alien before the fire and a citizen after it. Ideas are weapons — a paper claim defeats a paper law.
Born 1886 in Ukraine; barred from Russian school as a Jew; forbidden by her father to read Russian; taught herself anyway and paid for books by writing neighbors' letters; radicalized by a neighbor's revolutionary pamphlets; emigrated at seventeen to escape pogroms; garment worker and union organizer at twenty-three.
Born 1886 in Ukraine; barred from Russian school as a Jew; forbidden by her father to read Russian; taught herself anyway and paid for books by writing neighbors' letters; radicalized by a neighbor's revolutionary pamphlets; emigrated at seventeen to escape pogroms; garment worker and union organizer at twenty-three.
What did they believe?
That she was "tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike."
What did they want?
A general strike, declared "now!"
What did they do?
Ignored older male unionists who called her a hot-headed pest and said young women could not sustain a strike; rushed the Cooper Union platform; the chairman joined hands with her, the crowd pledged, and twenty thousand walked out the next morning. Blacklisted from every New York garment shop afterward, she fought for suffrage, socialism, consumers, tenants, and against nuclear weapons, and at ninety-six helped the orderlies of her Los Angeles nursing home organize a union.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's Mother Jones.
Ideas are weapons — reading opened politics; a speech turned grievance into decision. Economic forces — organizing carried a personal price. Race is constructed — a girl excluded from school by religion becomes the voice of a workforce.
Several thousand plantation workers on Oahu organized in "blood unions" by ethnicity; supported by Japanese on other islands with money and food, by Japanese businesses, and by the Japanese Physicians Association, which gave free medical care.
Several thousand plantation workers on Oahu organized in "blood unions" by ethnicity; supported by Japanese on other islands with money and food, by Japanese businesses, and by the Japanese Physicians Association, which gave free medical care.
What did they believe?
That Portuguese workers getting $22.50 a month to their $18 for the same work was racial injustice; that they wanted to "unite our destiny with that of Hawaii, sharing the prosperity and adversity of Hawaii with other citizens of Hawaii."
What did they want?
Higher wages and an end to racial pay scales.
What did they do?
Struck for four months; leaders were arrested for conspiracy; Chinese, Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Filipino scabs replaced them; then the planters raised wages and ended the racial wage system, and began importing Filipinos in mass (30 percent of the workforce by 1920).
Why does it matter?
The strike marks the moment sojourners become settlers: Japanese Americans.
Ideas are weapons — belonging turned into a wage argument. Economic forces — community resources sustain a strike, mirroring the mutualistas of Chapter 7. Race is constructed — the racial wage scale was policy and could be repealed.
Workers at three factories including Triangle who walked out; the newly founded and under-resourced ILGWU; twenty thousand strikers, overwhelmingly Jewish women, after the Cooper Union mass meeting; then fifty thousand cloak and suit workers.
Workers at three factories including Triangle who walked out; the newly founded and under-resourced ILGWU; twenty thousand strikers, overwhelmingly Jewish women, after the Cooper Union mass meeting; then fifty thousand cloak and suit workers.
What did they believe?
That "the power to do so had to come from the people themselves"; "We showed the world that women could fight."
What did they want?
A fifty-two-hour week, overtime pay, union recognition.
What did they do?
Faced police arrests and hired thugs; forced settlements from more than 300 of about 450 shirtwaist firms by February 1910, Triangle among them (it agreed to most demands but not safety in time); launched a decade of strikes. Labor historian Susan A. Glenn: by 1918 clothing workers were among the best-organized in America.
Why does it matter?
A workers' movement and an ethnic movement at once; victories sharpened Jewish identity, and Jewish Americans stayed committed to labor.
Economic forces — collective refusal wins rules, not favors. Ideas are weapons — the poem "Uprising of the Twenty-Thousand" turns a strike into a shared story. Race is constructed — ethnic identity and class organization reinforce each other (compare the Japanese 1909 strike).
The Black real estate agents and white landlords of Harlem
Agents who leased empty apartments from white landlords after Harlem's housing boom collapsed and rented them to Black tenants at a profit; landlords who then neglected upkeep and raised rents on tenants who could not move elsewhere.
Agents who leased empty apartments from white landlords after Harlem's housing boom collapsed and rented them to Black tenants at a profit; landlords who then neglected upkeep and raised rents on tenants who could not move elsewhere.
What did they believe?
The agents believed a collapse was an opening.
What did they want?
Housing for Black migrants; profit.
What did they do?
Turned a wealthy white neighborhood (Harlem had been a third Black in 1790, mostly white by 1890) into the "Negro Capital of the World": 50,000 Blacks in 1914; in the 1920s 118,000 whites left and 87,000 Blacks arrived. Tenants got broken pipes, leaking roofs, rats, and rising rents on domestic and service wages.
Why does it matter?
Availability required access; access was won by Black agents against residents trying to keep Blacks out.
Economic forces — a housing market shaped by a racial boundary produces a captive tenantry. Race is constructed — discrimination elsewhere makes Harlem both refuge and trap.
That there was no reason to stay "where your mother, sister and daughter are raped and burned at the stake; where your father, brother and sons are... hung to a pole, riddled with bullets."
What did they want?
Southern Blacks to come North for safety and self-respect.
What did they do?
Published the case for leaving.
Why does it matter?
Safety as a push factor distinct from the Mexican Revolution: the violence here was a domestic terror system.
Ideas are weapons — a newspaper as a migration engine. Race is constructed — lynching enforces the category.
Employers who hired Black workers to undermine white unions; Parker, a Black man paid by white owners to run the American Unity Labor Union.
What did they believe?
That divided workers were cheaper.
What did they want?
No united union.
What did they do?
Parker urged Blacks not to trust whites and to join only the Black union; when the white Stockyards Labor Council opened its doors to Black members, the offer was refused. By 1920 most Black men and 15 percent of Black women were in factory rather than service jobs.
Why does it matter?
"The old strategy of divide and control again" — the same tactic as the Hawaiian planters and the North Adams shoe factory.
Economic forces — a hiring decision made to weaken bargaining. Ideas are weapons — a fake union sells distrust. Race is constructed — the boundary is funded by management.
A young man from a South Carolina farm who went North to earn $25 a week.
What did they believe?
That his success should be shared.
What did they want?
To help his people.
What did they do?
Came home with more than $100 and nice clothes, gave his mother $50, banked $50, and had pocket change left, as reported by a South Carolina newspaper.
Why does it matter?
Glowing reports like this were the information network that kept the migration moving.
Quock paid for a "citizen paper" and memorized a 200-page book about his "family"; two young men claimed to be brothers, sons of a merchant.
What did they believe?
That quick wits mattered as much as memory.
What did they want?
To pass.
What did they do?
Quock was held three weeks. The "brothers" were asked separately whether there was a dog in the house; one said yes, the other no. The first explained: "we had a dog, but we knew we were coming to the United States, so we ate the dog."
Why does it matter?
Those who failed were shipped back to China.
Ideas are weapons — a story told well enough is a passport.
Born in Jamaica; founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1914); based in Harlem from 1916; convicted of mail fraud in 1922 on a weak case, jailed two years, deported.
Born in Jamaica; founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1914); based in Harlem from 1916; convicted of mail fraud in 1922 on a weak case, jailed two years, deported.
What did they believe?
"Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will"; that Black skin is beautiful, Africa had a glorious past, and "it is time for the 400,000,000 Negroes to claim Africa for themselves."
What did they want?
Black unity, pride, and power, and an African nation for the world's Black people.
What did they do?
As a boy, learned race existed when his white playmate's parents separated them at fourteen; built the UNIA with parades, publications, Black-owned groceries and laundries, and the Black Star Line shipping company, which was badly managed and went into debt. The Spokesman said he "made thousands think, who had never thought before."
Why does it matter?
Takaki separates the failed company from the idea that outlived it.
Race is constructed — a boundary taught to a fourteen-year-old by adults. Ideas are weapons — pride as an organizing message; the idea survives the institution. Economic forces — Black capitalism as a strategy.
The new generation and the Southern whites who missed the old one
African Americans born after the Civil War who had never known slavery; the whites who lamented that "humble, polite, and courteous" Blacks were disappearing and complained the young were "discontented and wanted to be roaming."
African Americans born after the Civil War who had never known slavery; the whites who lamented that "humble, polite, and courteous" Blacks were disappearing and complained the young were "discontented and wanted to be roaming."
What did they believe?
The young believed they could claim dignity somewhere; the whites believed Blacks had a "place."
What did they want?
The young wanted to see the world and escape lynching and rape; the whites wanted deference.
What did they do?
About two million migrated North by 1930: "their freedom had been given to them... but their migration was their own choice."
Why does it matter?
Takaki's point that something "deeper than economics" moved this generation.
Ideas are weapons — the habits slavery bred died with the generation that had them. Race is constructed — the "place" was a social expectation, and it could be refused.
Agents sent South by factories that had once refused Black workers, after World War I cut off European immigration in 1914; a Georgia man who told a reporter he went from $1.25 or $1.50 a day to $2.75 at a Newark dye house with a rent-free room and his fare paid North.
What did they believe?
The worker believed the offer; the recruiters believed Black labor could fill the war shortage.
What did they want?
Workers; wages.
What did they do?
Whole trainloads went North.
Why does it matter?
One migration changes another: the recruiters came because the Europeans stopped.
Economic forces — a job offer with fare and housing lowers the cost of leaving.
Young men who entered as sons of Chinese American citizens: some real sons, some sons of pretend citizens, some who paid to be claimed. About fifty thousand Chinese entered through Angel Island by 1943.
What did they believe?
That memorized details could pass an interrogation.
What did they want?
Entry to America.
What did they do?
Studied family lists on the voyage and threw them overboard at the Golden Gate; waited in unsanitary barracks for interviews about the number of steps in a house or where they slept.
Why does it matter?
Angel Island was the Chinese Ellis Island, built to keep people out.
Race is constructed — citizenship "existed only on paper," which is to say it existed. Ideas are weapons — the interrogation and the memorized book are opposing weapons.
Young Jewish women, many of whom came ahead of their families because they could sew; more than a third of the garment workforce in 1910; on March 25, 1911, eight hundred trapped at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, 146 dead, mostly Jewish and Italian, some jumping from the ninth floor with such force they tore the nets from the firemen's hands.
What did they believe?
That conditions could be changed; they had struck the year before for sanitation and safety.
What did they want?
Safety and dignity.
What did they do?
Died; their mothers found their blackened bodies on the sidewalk; grocers and peddlers lent carts to carry the dead; panic spread to the shtetls.
Why does it matter?
A reporter: "I remembered their great strike of last year in which the same girls had demanded... more safety precautions. Their dead bodies were the answer."
Economic forces — crowded tables with no exits were a cost decision. Ideas are weapons — the fire made the strike's demands unanswerable.
About 6,400 men from the Punjab by 1920, nearly all Sikhs, farmers at home and field hands here; Inder Singh, an Imperial Valley farmer who married a Mexican woman in 1922.
About 6,400 men from the Punjab by 1920, nearly all Sikhs, farmers at home and field hands here; Inder Singh, an Imperial Valley farmer who married a Mexican woman in 1922.
What did they believe?
Singh: "Your land law can't get rid of me now; I am going to stay."
What did they want?
Land and family.
What did they do?
Married Mexican women they met in the fields; bought land in their wives' names because courts said Sikhs were not white, so they could not naturalize, so the 1913 Alien Land Law barred them; raised Catholic children who ate tortillas and rotis and spoke Spanish with Punjabi fathers.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's example of a racial boundary and a workaround in one household.
Race is constructed — the same land is forbidden to the husband and open to the wife by legal category. Economic forces — the law's target is land, and land is worked around.
A Japanese immigrant of twenty years, high school graduate, college attendee, worker, and family man in Hawaii.
What did they believe?
That he qualified as an American.
What did they want?
Citizenship.
What did they do?
Applied in 1915, was refused, and fought to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 1922 that he was not Caucasian and therefore not white.
Why does it matter?
The 1913 Alien Land Law barred land purchases by aliens ineligible for citizenship, meaning the Japanese; the 1924 immigration law then barred all such aliens from entering. A Japanese American newspaper accused Congress of betraying America's ideals; a haiku: "America... once / A dream of hope and longing, / Now a life of tears."
Race is constructed — the highest court draws the line and calls it obvious. Economic forces — the land law was the point; citizenship was the mechanism.
The competency commission and the Interior Department official at the Last-Arrow pageant
A three-man commission that went house to house judging Indian families' houses, farms, child care, and "economic status," and the official who ran the ceremony described in the Gettysburg Times of January 5, 1917.
A three-man commission that went house to house judging Indian families' houses, farms, child care, and "economic status," and the official who ran the ceremony described in the Gettysburg Times of January 5, 1917.
What did they believe?
That citizenship meant ceasing to live "the life of an Indian" and living "the life of a white man."
What did they want?
"To modernize the race."
What did they do?
Called each selected man by his English name (the article's example: James Robinson, once Rain-in-the-Face), had him shoot a last arrow, then handed him a plow (work), a purse (savings), and a flag (citizenship), and told him he could keep the arrow as a souvenir of "your noble race."
Why does it matter?
Takaki's closing observation: the article never says what the Indians thought of giving up their names and customs.
Race is constructed — a ceremony marks the crossing from one race to another; whiteness is a set of behaviors officials can award. Ideas are weapons — a pageant turns dispossession into an honor.
Groups formed to pressure real estate agents not to sell to Blacks and owners not to sell or rent; their leader declared, "The districts which are now white must remain white.
Groups formed to pressure real estate agents not to sell to Blacks and owners not to sell or rent; their leader declared, "The districts which are now white must remain white. There will be no compromise." The Chicago Real Estate Board reported Blacks "pouring into Chicago at the rate of ten thousand a month" in 1917.
What did they believe?
That whiteness of a neighborhood was a property to defend.
What did they want?
Blacks confined to the South Side.
What did they do?
Bombed several Black families' homes in 1917; white gangs beat and murdered Black men in streets and parks; after a Black youth drowned when he drifted into the "whites only" section of a beach and police made no arrest, a riot killed 23 Blacks and 15 whites and injured 342 Blacks and 178 whites.
Why does it matter?
Chicago's Black population went from 30,000 in 1900 to 109,000 in 1920. Week 32's housing-and-hiring aim lives here.
Race is constructed — segregation is organized, not natural. Economic forces — housing scarcity plus racial boundary equals higher rents for Blacks.
That Harvard had a "Jewish problem" and that limiting Jewish enrollment would prevent anti-Semitism on campus.
What did they want?
Fewer Jewish students.
What did they do?
Introduced "well-rounded" admissions criteria, geographic preferences against New York City, and required photographs so that Jews who had changed their names could be identified "by their facial features."
Why does it matter?
The model for every later quota that never names its target.
Ideas are weapons — exclusion presented as protection; the targets are blamed for the hostility. Race is constructed — a photograph requirement treats Jewishness as visible biology.
The Filipino union that struck first; the Japanese union that joined, making eight thousand strikers, 77 percent of Oahu's plantation workforce, and proposed one union for "laborers of all nationalities"; Pablo Manlapit, the Filipino leader whom the planters bribed to call off the strike as a Japanese plot to cripple Hawaii's economy.
What did they believe?
That the labor movement had to be built on working-class unity across ethnic lines.
What did they want?
Better pay; one union.
What did they do?
Shut down sugar production; many Filipinos defied Manlapit and stayed out; evicted strikers sheltered in Honolulu vacant lots during a flu epidemic, and 150 died; the strike collapsed in July; three months later the planters quietly raised wages 50 percent.
Why does it matter?
The Hawaiian side of the aim's comparison with the JMLA: same solidarity, same employer tactics, same mixed result.
Economic forces — shared refusal creates bargaining power; a lost strike still wins raises. Ideas are weapons — the bribe and the propaganda divide; the proposal for one union unites. Race is constructed — Filipino workers defied their own leader rather than accept the racial frame.
Hughes, who named the "New Negro Renaissance"; novelist Jean Toomer, painter Jacob Lawrence, musician Cab Calloway.
What did they believe?
That Black lives, history, and culture were the proper subject of art; Hughes asked whether he belonged to Africa or to "Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem."
What did they want?
A literature that rebelled against white, middle-class America and a self that was both African and American.
What did they do?
Made Harlem the center of Black creativity in the 1920s.
Why does it matter?
Hughes returns from Chapter 1; the Renaissance "hid much of the ghetto's squalor" until 1929 revealed it.
Ideas are weapons — art contests whose story counts; poetry claims belonging without surrendering history.
That "all of us under the Constitution are guaranteed equality, without regard to race, creed, or color"; that "if the Jew is barred today, the Italian will be tomorrow, then the Spaniard and the Pole, and at some future date the Irish."
What did they want?
To stop Harvard's quotas.
What did they do?
Spoke out publicly.
Why does it matter?
The Irish, targets in Chapter 6, here defend another group; Curley makes shared vulnerability the argument.
Ideas are weapons — constitutional equality used to mobilize across ethnic lines.
A Seattle Nisei, author of Nisei Daughter; a Mickey Mouse Club member who also studied odori dance and ballet, ate pickled radishes and ham and eggs, attended Japanese theater, sumo, and community picnics.
A Seattle Nisei, author of Nisei Daughter; a Mickey Mouse Club member who also studied odori dance and ballet, ate pickled radishes and ham and eggs, attended Japanese theater, sumo, and community picnics.
What did they believe?
That she was "a complex combination of two cultures" and wanted both; that the Nisei did not wish to be "American only."
What did they want?
A career; secretarial college admitted only six Japanese American girls because it could not place them in jobs.
What did they do?
Wrote the autobiography that gives the chapter its word for Nisei experience: twoness.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's closing question: what did it mean to be an American?
Race is constructed — the culture problem is really a belonging problem. Ideas are weapons — her book claims both identities as compatible.
An unnamed nativist who objected to limiting Europeans "while we throw the country open without limitation to Negroes, Indians, and half-breeds"; magazines warning of "Mexicanization"; Anglo workers and the AFL complaining that cheap Mexican labor put white men out of work.
An unnamed nativist who objected to limiting Europeans "while we throw the country open without limitation to Negroes, Indians, and half-breeds"; magazines warning of "Mexicanization"; Anglo workers and the AFL complaining that cheap Mexican labor put white men out of work.
What did they believe?
That Mexicans' mixed-race ancestry made them unfit and their presence a national threat.
What did they want?
Mexicans out.
What did they do?
Built the climate for repatriation.
Why does it matter?
The AFL that refused the JMLA's Japanese members (Chapter 7) now opposes Mexican labor too.
Ideas are weapons — "Mexicanization" turns neighbors into a danger. Race is constructed — "half-breeds" ranks a people by a blood theory. Economic forces — the job complaint is the engine.
That the rumors of mainland hostility were exaggerated, until a barber asked his nationality and, on hearing "Japanese," drove him out "as if he were driving away a cat or a dog."
What did they want?
A haircut.
What did they do?
Learned the difference between a place where Japanese were 40 percent of the population and one where they were 2 percent.
Why does it matter?
Sets up the mainland half of the chapter.
Race is constructed — "yellow race" is the barber's category, and it overrides the customer.
That Jews sent children to college a generation early, producing "more dirty Jews and tactless Jews in college than dirty and tactless Italians, Armenians, or Slovaks."
What did they want?
Fewer Jews at Harvard.
What did they do?
Gave voice to the campus backlash against students whose grades made others look bad.
Why does it matter?
Nativism aimed at success rather than failure.
Ideas are weapons — a slur dressed as sociology. Race is constructed — "dirty" is assigned to a group with the best grades.
Americans who favored the "native-born" over newcomers, and the Congress that passed the Immigration Law of 1924.
What did they believe?
That an "invasion" of ambitious, successful, strike-prone foreigners threatened the country; that Jews should not live in Gentile neighborhoods.
What did they want?
Fewer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
What did they do?
Set quotas at 2 percent of each nationality's US population in 1890, before mass Jewish immigration; wrote deed rules forbidding sale of property to Jews. More than a hundred thousand Jews still moved out of the Lower East Side in the 1920s to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and beyond.
Why does it matter?
The Chinese Exclusion Act invented limits by nationality; 1924 generalized them.
Race is constructed — a quota table and a deed covenant define who belongs. Economic forces — hostility sharpened as Jews succeeded and bought homes.
That America had never yet been the America "the dreamers dreamed" — for the poor white, the Negro, the red man, or the immigrant.
What did they want?
To "let America be America again."
What did they do?
Wrote the poem that gives Takaki the book's "epic story": the struggle to make the promise real.
Why does it matter?
Takaki lists the peoples in the poem — pushed by poverty and persecution, pulled by dreams, brought in chains, fleeing wars — as the cast of multicultural America.
Ideas are weapons — a poem holds the nation to its own promise. Race is constructed — Hughes puts the "poor white" in the same line as the Negro and the red man.
An unnamed American-born Japanese man working a produce stand in the Depression; one of the Nisei, who averaged two years of college, above the national average.
An unnamed American-born Japanese man working a produce stand in the Depression; one of the Nisei, who averaged two years of college, above the national average.
What did they believe?
That he should have been a doctor or lawyer: "I am only what I am, a professional carrot washer."
What did they want?
The career his education promised.
What did they do?
Worked in the small Japanese businesses (laundries, fruit stands) that were the only employers open to him.
Why does it matter?
Nearly two-thirds of mainland Japanese were US-born by 1940; citizens by birth, they were still called "Japs," told to "go back to Japan," dodged rocks from white children, and were complimented on their English.
Race is constructed — citizenship and education did not prevent exclusion. Economic forces — the Depression closed doors that prejudice had already narrowed.
Unemployed white men shouting against the hiring of African Americans when Blacks came to cities seeking work.
What did they believe?
That jobs belonged to whites first.
What did they want?
Black workers fired first — which employers did.
What did they do?
Helped produce Black unemployment 30 to 60 percent higher than white; more than half of Blacks in Southern cities jobless by 1932; families in cellars foraging in garbage cans; federal relief paid whites at higher rates.
Why does it matter?
The wartime pull reversed; most Blacks still lived in the South growing cotton on shares.
Economic forces — a crisis concentrated on those with least power. Race is constructed — relief rates set by category.
The repatriation agencies and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce
Private charities and government agencies that threatened to cut welfare, offered "free" train transport (sometimes a boxcar), and used police raids; the Chamber that estimated 60 percent of deported children were US-born citizens.
Private charities and government agencies that threatened to cut welfare, offered "free" train transport (sometimes a boxcar), and used police raids; the Chamber that estimated 60 percent of deported children were US-born citizens.
What did they believe?
That Mexicans were to blame for white unemployment.
What did they want?
Mexicans gone; the word was "repatriation," the fact was deportation.
What did they do?
Sent about four hundred thousand people to Mexico in the 1930s, many of them citizen children.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's clearest instance of demand withdrawn: wanted at 14 cents an hour, expelled when the jobs disappeared.
Race is constructed — citizenship ignored when the category is "Mexican." Economic forces — crisis becomes racial blame. Ideas are weapons — "repatriation" hides coercion.
The nation's leading Black scholar and historian, a founder of the NAACP and lifelong advocate of integration; the organization that rejected his Depression-era proposal.
The nation's leading Black scholar and historian, a founder of the NAACP and lifelong advocate of integration; the organization that rejected his Depression-era proposal.
What did they believe?
Du Bois, in the crisis, that Blacks should practice voluntary, temporary segregation — a Black nation within the United States doing business only with itself. The NAACP, that the answer was a movement to "unite all labor, white and black, skilled and unskilled, agricultural and industrial."
What did they want?
Both wanted Black survival and power; they disagreed on the route.
What did they do?
Debated. Meanwhile the United Mine Workers (1933), the CIO, and the United Auto Workers recruited Black members and pledged against discrimination, and Democratic politicians began courting the Black vote, pulling Blacks from Lincoln's Republican Party.
Why does it matter?
Sets up Chapter 15's argument that racial and economic injustice must be fought together.
Ideas are weapons — two strategies for the same goal. Race is constructed — unions changing their membership boundary. Economic forces — class solidarity proposed as the answer to racial crisis.
Six years old in Hamilton, Montana, in 1931; father and eldest sister in the beet fields, mother cooking tortillas, when armed authorities burst in. All six children were US-born citizens; the trunk with their birth certificates was left behind.
What did they believe?
"You can't put 16 years of pure hell out of your mind."
What did they want?
To come home.
What did they do?
Jailed ten days, shipped by train to Mexico; the family caught typhoid; his father died four years later; his mother was "destitute, with six of us, in a country we knew nothing about. We were misfits there." Schooled only to sixth grade in Mexico City slums, he obtained proof of his Utah birth sixteen years later, returned, worked for a railroad, and sent his children to college.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's case study: labor demanded, people rejected, citizens deported.
Race is constructed — a birth certificate is worthless against the category "Mexican." Economic forces — the Depression made the family disposable. Ideas are weapons — his testimony against the word "repatriation."
In the extermination of Jews and other minorities.
What did they want?
A racially "pure" empire.
What did they do?
Carried out "the ultimate pogrom," murdering millions of European Jews and others.
Why does it matter?
Appears here because his rise coincided with Jewish immigrants' entry into the American mainstream; American Jews who demanded rescue efforts met indifference and anti-Semitism, which fueled Jewish American activism for human rights.
Ideas are weapons — racial ideology taken to its end point. Race is constructed — a category invented to decide who lives.
Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin D. Roosevelt; admirer of Pueblo communal life; author of the Indian Reorganization Act (1934).
What did they believe?
That only Indians "still knew the secret of building character through communal life"; that "if the Indian life is a good life, then we should be proud and glad to have this different and native culture going on by the side of ours"; also that Navajo sheep were destroying the range and silting Boulder Dam.
What did they want?
To let Indians remain Indians while entering modern life; also to reduce Navajo livestock by 400,000 head.
What did they do?
Ended allotment, funded tribal land purchases and self-government for tribes that voted to accept it (172 tribes with 132,426 members yes; 73 tribes with 63,467 no); flew to the Navajo reservation seventeen times over five years to promote stock reduction; carried it out anyway. He called the Navajo project an "ethnic laboratory" and later admitted he had never seen "an anxiety-ridden and anguished hostility even approaching" theirs.
Why does it matter?
The reformer who ended the Dawes Act was also the administrator who, for the sake of California farms and Los Angeles electricity, destroyed the Navajo economy on the basis of bad science.
Ideas are weapons — cultural pluralism in the law, social engineering in practice. Economic forces — the dam decided the sheep. Race is constructed — the guardian still decides.
The American public of the 1930s and the passengers of the St. Louis
The 66 percent of Americans who, in one poll, opposed admitting even endangered Jewish children; more than nine hundred German Jewish refugees on a ship the United States turned away.
The 66 percent of Americans who, in one poll, opposed admitting even endangered Jewish children; more than nine hundred German Jewish refugees on a ship the United States turned away.
What did they believe?
The public believed immigration quotas should hold.
What did they want?
The refugees wanted safety; the public wanted them elsewhere.
What did they do?
The ship was refused; Jewish American organizations, at first opposed to exceptions, demanded rescue once the fate awaiting Jews was clear; the government, informed of the death camps in 1942, said only victory could help.
Why does it matter?
Chapter 1's "lack of interest or even anti-Semitism" made concrete.
Ideas are weapons — quota law as a moral shield. Race is constructed — the 1924 quotas (Chapter 11) decided who could be saved.
About 900,000 Black enlistees in a segregated "Jim Crow army": Black-only regiments and camps, barred from base churches and clubs, assigned to cooking and cleaning or to explosives and munitions; the first Black military pilots, who protected white pilots over France and Germany; the tank battalion that held at the Battle of the Bulge; Black women in the Women's Army Corps in Europe.
What did they believe?
That the government was hypocritical to fight for democracy with a segregated army.
What did they want?
Integration; Roosevelt refused.
What did they do?
Proved themselves when allowed; a million Blacks, more than half women, took defense jobs as steel, shipyards, aircraft, and munitions plants ran short of men; followed the jobs into cities where hate crimes and the 1943 Detroit riot (25 Blacks and 9 whites dead) met them.
Why does it matter?
Chapter 15 will show that this generation's anger became the civil rights movement.
Race is constructed — military rules make race matter and Black pilots disprove the rules. Economic forces — labor shortage, not conscience, opened the factories.
"We knew what it was like to be discriminated against."
What did they want?
To win the war together.
What did they do?
With other Mexican women, invited new Black coworkers to lunch after white workers refused to greet them; by week's end several whites joined the table.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's smallest and clearest example of a boundary refused.
Race is constructed — separation at the lunch table is maintained or ended by people. Ideas are weapons — shared experience of discrimination as a basis for solidarity.
Leong of San Francisco and the 13,499 Chinese Americans, more than a fifth of adult Chinese American men, who served; the Chinatown crowds that cheered when the first draftees were Chinese; an unnamed soldier who recalled that "all of a sudden, we became part of an American dream."
Leong of San Francisco and the 13,499 Chinese Americans, more than a fifth of adult Chinese American men, who served; the Chinatown crowds that cheered when the first draftees were Chinese; an unnamed soldier who recalled that "all of a sudden, we became part of an American dream."
What did they believe?
Leong: "For the first time we felt we could make it in American society."
What did they want?
Respect, and a way out of Chinatown.
What did they do?
Enlisted; three hundred Los Angeles laundry workers closed shop to help build the ship China Victory; Chinese Americans entered aircraft plants; Alice Yick trained as a mechanic at the Boston Navy Yard and Chinese American women built B-24 bombers.
Why does it matter?
Japan's radio broadcasts attacked American exclusion laws, so Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, set a quota of 105 a year, and allowed naturalization.
Race is constructed — an alliance with China turned "Chinese" from menace to friend overnight; the naturalization rule changed, the people did not. Ideas are weapons — enemy propaganda forced a domestic reform. Economic forces — war labor opened jobs closed for decades.
Brown, a Navajo who said "the marines recruited Navajo for our language"; the code talkers who sent more than eight hundred error-free messages in the first two days at Iwo Jima (four died); Conner, who said "Without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima"; Draper, who recalled boarding school where "the U.S. government told us not to speak Navajo, but during the war, they wanted us to speak it!"
What did they believe?
Draper saw the irony; the marines saw an "unbreakable code."
What did they want?
Victory; recognition.
What did they do?
Turned a language the government had tried to erase into the Pacific war's most secure communication.
Why does it matter?
The Last-Arrow pageant of Chapter 9 in reverse.
Ideas are weapons — a language is literally a weapon. Race is constructed — the same tongue is "savage" in 1917 and priceless in 1945.
A civil rights organization founded by Mexican American veterans in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1948; more than a hundred chapters in twenty-three states within a year.
A civil rights organization founded by Mexican American veterans in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1948; more than a hundred chapters in twenty-three states within a year.
What did they believe?
That the victory over fascism should be followed by victory over discrimination.
What did they want?
Equal treatment, bilingual education.
What did they do?
Boycotted a company that discriminated in hiring; called for classes in English and Spanish.
Why does it matter?
Veterans' expectations organized into an institution.
Ideas are weapons — organization as the step between expectation and change.
Thirty-three thousand American-born Japanese men who enlisted from the camps; several thousand who served as translators in the Pacific, crawling close enough to Japanese officers to hear commands; the 442nd Regimental Combat Team of mainland and Hawaiian Japanese Americans, with more than 18,000 decorations and 3,600 Purple Hearts from Italy and France.
What did they believe?
That defending the country was the best way to prove loyalty and fulfill the duties of citizens.
What did they want?
Acceptance.
What did they do?
An intelligence officer estimated the translators shortened the war by two years. Returning with missing limbs and medals, they were told "We don't serve Japs here"; their families came home from the camps to signs reading "No Japs allowed" and to lost homes and livelihoods.
Why does it matter?
Service did not repeal the category.
Race is constructed — citizenship and sacrifice did not change what the barber saw. Ideas are weapons — their record exposes the internment's premise.
Nakai, a Navajo who explained enlistment; the Navajo who were nearly a fifth of all reservation Indians who enlisted, from a reservation where average income was $128 a year, two-fifths from temporary government work.
Nakai, a Navajo who explained enlistment; the Navajo who were nearly a fifth of all reservation Indians who enlisted, from a reservation where average income was $128 a year, two-fifths from temporary government work.
What did they believe?
"We are proud to be American. We're proud to be American Indians. We always stand ready when our country needs us."
What did they want?
To serve, and to escape poverty.
What did they do?
Enlisted despite asking why they should fight "the white man's war" after losing land since 1607. A year after the war the average Navajo man earned less than $100.
Why does it matter?
Collier's stock reduction (Chapter 9) produced the poverty that made enlistment attractive.
Economic forces — one decision, two causes: pride and poverty. Race is constructed — "American Indian" and "American" claimed together.
A Japanese American woman born on a sugarcane plantation, schooled only through eighth grade; after Takaki's father died when he was five, she married a Chinese cook with very little formal education.
A Japanese American woman born on a sugarcane plantation, schooled only through eighth grade; after Takaki's father died when he was five, she married a Chinese cook with very little formal education.
What did they believe?
That education was the way up.
What did they want?
To give their son a chance to go to college.
What did they do?
Raised him in a working-class, multicultural Honolulu neighborhood and pushed him toward college despite their own limited schooling.
Why does it matter?
Plantation labor is where the Japanese American story in Hawaii begins (Chapter 10); Takaki's family is the second generation of that story.
Economic forces — working-class immigrants invest in education as the one resource they can hand down.
Eight hospitalized servicemen who wrote to a Detroit newspaper after the 1943 riot: Jim Stanley, Negro; Joe Wakamatsu, Japanese; Eng Yu, Chinese; John Brennan, Irish; Paul Colosi, Italian; Don Holzheimer, German; Joe Wojiechowski, Polish; Mike Cohen, Jewish.
Eight hospitalized servicemen who wrote to a Detroit newspaper after the 1943 riot: Jim Stanley, Negro; Joe Wakamatsu, Japanese; Eng Yu, Chinese; John Brennan, Irish; Paul Colosi, Italian; Don Holzheimer, German; Joe Wojiechowski, Polish; Mike Cohen, Jewish.
What did they believe?
That they were fighting and willing to die for "the principles that gave birth to the United States of America."
What did they want?
To know what they were fighting for if Detroit could riot.
What did they do?
Signed with their ethnic identities: "the war for freedom still needed to be won at home."
Why does it matter?
Roosevelt said nothing about Detroit; these men said everything.
Ideas are weapons — a signature line as an argument. Race is constructed — eight categories, one uniform.
That Germans and Italians "were not a problem" but that the Japanese question could be left to the military; that segregation in the armed forces need not end; that the only way to aid Europe's Jews was to win the war.
What did they want?
Victory, and as little domestic disruption as possible.
What did they do?
Approved a plan to remove twenty thousand "dangerous" Japanese from Hawaii (Emmons ignored it); left the West Coast decision to DeWitt; signed the 1941 executive order banning discrimination in government and defense employment under threat of a mass march; refused to desegregate the military; said nothing about the 1943 Detroit riot; turned away the St. Louis with more than nine hundred German Jewish refugees; created a War Refugee Board only in 1944, admitting one thousand people.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's central case study is a decision Roosevelt delegated rather than made.
Race is constructed — three enemy ancestries, one interned. Economic forces — the defense-jobs order followed labor shortages as much as protest. Ideas are weapons — "win the war first" as an answer to genocide.
The Navy secretary wanted all Japanese in Hawaii interned; Emmons was Hawaii's military governor.
What did they believe?
Emmons: "this is America and we must do things the American Way," meaning the Constitution; no known sabotage had occurred in Hawaii.
What did they want?
Emmons wanted no mass concentration camps.
What did they do?
Emmons interned 1,444 people he judged possible threats, not the 20,000 Roosevelt approved, in the one place actually attacked.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's control case: the same war, the same ancestry, a different choice — though 1,444 people still lost their liberty.
Ideas are weapons — the Constitution invoked against panic. Race is constructed — Hawaii, where Japanese were 40 percent of the population, could not afford the category "enemy"; California, where they were 2 percent, could.
The braceros and the Mexican American defense workers
About 200,000 Mexican guest workers admitted for fixed periods by 1947; Mexican Americans in Los Angeles shipyards, from zero in 1941 to 17,000 in 1944; thousands of women who became riveters.
About 200,000 Mexican guest workers admitted for fixed periods by 1947; Mexican Americans in Los Angeles shipyards, from zero in 1941 to 17,000 in 1944; thousands of women who became riveters.
What did they believe?
That defense work was patriotism and personal growth.
What did they want?
Jobs and skills.
What did they do?
Built the ships and planes.
Why does it matter?
The country that deported 400,000 Mexicans in the 1930s imported 200,000 in the 1940s.
Economic forces — labor demand writes the entry rules. Race is constructed — "guest worker" is a category designed to be temporary.
The FBI director and the Attorney General of the United States.
What did they believe?
Hoover: there was no security reason to intern West Coast Japanese Americans. Biddle: internment would be racist and "make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system."
What did they want?
No mass internment.
What did they do?
Objected, on the record, and were overruled.
Why does it matter?
The decision was contested inside the government; the racial argument won.
Ideas are weapons — the objections existed; the question is why they lost. Race is constructed — the nation's top law officers saw the policy as racial.
A twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker at a Kansas aircraft plant whose letter "Should I Sacrifice to Live 'Half American'?" the Courier published on January 31, 1942.
A twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker at a Kansas aircraft plant whose letter "Should I Sacrifice to Live 'Half American'?" the Courier published on January 31, 1942.
What did they believe?
That "this country is worth defending" and would "eventually become the true democracy it was designed to be... but not through any relaxation of the efforts to secure them."
What did they want?
A Double V: "the first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies within."
What did they do?
Asked whether he should die to live half American and whether full citizenship was too much to ask in exchange; the Courier turned his idea into the Double V campaign with clubs, pins, and articles across the Black press.
Why does it matter?
The bridge to Chapter 15: the war's slogan repurposed as a civil rights demand.
Ideas are weapons — a patriotic symbol redefined into a critique; a slogan becomes a movement. Race is constructed — "half American" names the gap between citizenship and treatment.
That people of Japanese ancestry could not be trusted to be loyal, citizens or not.
What did they want?
Every person of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast removed.
What did they do?
Ordered 120,000 people, two-thirds of them citizens, into guarded camps in remote deserts, whole families to a single room behind barbed wire and guard towers; their homes and businesses were "snapped up at bargain prices by white buyers." The few who resisted were convicted, and the Supreme Court accepted "military necessity" without evidence.
Why does it matter?
Robert Matsui's question from Chapter 1 is answered here: a six-month-old was an enemy alien because DeWitt said so.
Race is constructed — ancestry, not conduct, is the rule. Economic forces — forced removal redistributes property to white buyers. Ideas are weapons — "military necessity" as an unexamined justification.
A seventeen-year-old marine from the East Los Angeles barrio who had learned Japanese from a neighboring family later sent to an internment camp.
What did they believe?
After killing thirty-three soldiers on his first day at Saipan, that he should persuade the rest to surrender.
What did they want?
To stop the killing.
What did they do?
Alone, captured six soldiers, sent three to bring back more under threat of shooting the others, and had eight hundred prisoners within seven hours.
Why does it matter?
A barrio friendship with an interned family became a weapon of war and mercy.
Ideas are weapons — a language crossed two boundaries the government had drawn. Race is constructed — the family that taught him was in a camp while he used their language.
That "the war had provided us the unique chance to be socially and economically independent, and we didn't want to give up this experience simply because the war ended."
What did they want?
First-class citizenship for women in their communities, as the returning men wanted it for themselves.
What did they do?
Refused to go back.
Why does it matter?
Independence experienced cannot be un-experienced.
Economic forces — wages changed expectations. Race is constructed — "second-class citizen" is a status men and women both rejected.
The Zionist Organization of America and President Harry Truman
The Zionist organization, whose membership rose from 18,000 in 1929 to 52,000 in 1939 and 136,000 in 1945; Truman, Roosevelt's vice president, president from 1945.
The Zionist organization, whose membership rose from 18,000 in 1929 to 52,000 in 1939 and 136,000 in 1945; Truman, Roosevelt's vice president, president from 1945.
What did they believe?
Zionists believed the Jewish people needed a homeland after the Holocaust. Truman, in his 1945 diary, called the "Japs" "savages, ruthless and fanatic."
The UN General Assembly voted in 1947 to partition Palestine; Truman recognized Israel in 1948. Truman ordered the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating hundreds of thousands, and accepted surrender on the one condition that Japan keep its emperor rather than drop a third bomb.
Why does it matter?
Takaki calls the Pacific war "a war of racial hatreds" and titles the section "A Holocaust Called Hiroshima." Du Bois: the war was "for democracy not only for white folks but for yellow, brown, and black."
Ideas are weapons — "savages" from Chapter 2 to the president's diary; the subhuman image licenses the bomb. Race is constructed — a genocide created a new nation-state.
Mexican American families who challenged school segregation in Orange County, California, and the federal judges who heard their case.
What did they believe?
That segregating Mexican children violated equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
What did they want?
Integrated schools.
What did they do?
Won a federal district court ruling in 1946, upheld on appeal in 1947, against segregation of Mexican American children in the defendant districts. California then repealed its remaining school-segregation statutes.
Why does it matter?
The case that "paved the way" for Brown.
Race is constructed — a school boundary contested and changed. Ideas are weapons — the Fourteenth Amendment as a tool.
"Negroes are in no mood to shoulder guns for democracy abroad, while they are denied democracy here at home."
What did they want?
An end to segregation in the armed forces.
What did they do?
Met with Truman, threatened a mass protest march, and got the 1948 executive order requiring equal treatment and opportunity in the military.
Why does it matter?
The chapter's first proof that the war caused the movement: service became leverage.
Ideas are weapons — the contradiction between democracy abroad and denial at home, turned into a demand. Race is constructed — a presidential order changes an institutional rule.
California Japanese immigrants interned during the war; barred by the 1913 Alien Land Law from owning land because they could not naturalize, they held it in their US-born son's name.
California Japanese immigrants interned during the war; barred by the 1913 Alien Land Law from owning land because they could not naturalize, they held it in their US-born son's name. California tried to seize it while they were in camp.
What did they believe?
That the law itself was unconstitutional.
What did they want?
Their land, and the law struck down.
What did they do?
Took the case to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 1948 that California had acted illegally; Justice Frank Murphy called the Alien Land Law "outright racial discrimination." The state supreme court voided the law in 1952.
Why does it matter?
Chapter 10's law, overturned by a family it had targeted, returning from Chapter 14's camps.
Race is constructed — three legal positions in one household: alien father, alien mother, citizen child. Ideas are weapons — a lawsuit as resistance.
Civil rights leader; quoted from his letter written in a jail cell.
What did they believe?
That "the goal of America is freedom" and that Black destiny "is tied up with America's destiny."
What did they want?
Freedom and equality for African Americans, won by claiming America's own stated ideals.
What did they do?
Led the civil rights movement of the 1960s, joined by people of other races, and won victories that changed society.
Why does it matter?
Takaki calls African Americans the "central minority" of US history: preferred-white plantation labor gave way after the 1676 uprising to enslaved Africans; after the Civil War came segregation, lynching, and riots; then the movement. King appears again in Chapter 15.
Ideas are weapons — King turns the nation's founding promise against its practice. Race is constructed — the "abused and scorned" are still Americans.
Harvard historian, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Uprooted (1951).
What did they believe?
That the "epic story" of America was the story of European immigrants.
What did they want?
To tell how migration "made the American people."
What did they do?
Wrote a celebrated immigration history that left out Native Americans and everyone who came from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Why does it matter?
Handlin is Takaki's example of a respected scholar carrying the Master Narrative. The omission is not hostility; it is a frame so normal that its author does not see it.
Ideas are weapons — a prize-winning history teaches readers whom to overlook. Race is constructed — "American" is quietly defined as white European.
Veterans' groups that pressed Congress; Nieda, one of about 46,000 elderly Issei who took the citizenship oath by 1965.
What did they believe?
Nieda's poem: "Going steadily to study English, / Even through the rain at night, / I thus attain, / Late in life, / American citizenship."
What did they want?
The 1790 "white persons" clause repealed.
What did they do?
Won it in 1952: immigrants of any skin color could naturalize.
Why does it matter?
The law Chapter 1 introduced, gone after 162 years.
Race is constructed — the boundary that defined Chapters 6, 8, 10, and 12 is erased by statute. Ideas are weapons — veterans' service as political capital.
The organization that argued Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Marshall, its lawyer, later a Supreme Court justice.
What did they believe?
Marshall was certain that after the bravery of Black and Japanese American soldiers, Americans "would have to respect the country's black and Asian citizens as the equals of whites."
What did they want?
Segregation ended in every public school.
What did they do?
Won the ruling that racial separation in schools was unconstitutional; the NAACP called it a sign that the United States deserved to lead the free world.
Why does it matter?
Integration stayed "a court ruling on paper" for years; the pressure would come from the streets.
Race is constructed — the highest court reverses the rule it made. Ideas are weapons — Cold War leadership used as an argument for equality.
A young Black minister who organized the Montgomery bus boycott through the Montgomery Improvement Association (1955); leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; assassinated in 1968.
A young Black minister who organized the Montgomery bus boycott through the Montgomery Improvement Association (1955); leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; assassinated in 1968.
What did they believe?
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'"
What did they want?
Segregation ended, then economic justice.
What did they do?
Led the boycott (won in 1956 when the city obeyed a court order); spoke to 200,000 at the 1963 March on Washington beneath Lincoln's memorial; became "the foremost symbol of the civil rights movement."
Why does it matter?
He had seen that half of Montgomery was Black and almost all of it confined to domestic and common labor.
Ideas are weapons — the nation's own creed turned into a demand. Economic forces — the movement he led hit "the walls of an inequality that was based on economics as well as on race."
Ronald Takaki, a historian from Hawaii, wrote a multicultural history of the United States and helped build ethnic studies programs.
What did they believe?
That American history is a story of many peoples, not one; that you should ask "How do you know what you know?"; that studying the past is for the sake of the future.
What did they want?
At first, to surf forever. Then, to recover the histories the Master Narrative left out and to prepare Americans for a future in which everyone is a minority.
What did they do?
Left Hawaii for the College of Wooster in 1957, earned a Ph.D. in American history, taught UCLA's first African American history course, built comparative ethnic studies programs at Berkeley, and wrote the book you are reading.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's own life is the book's first piece of evidence: a US-born citizen repeatedly asked how long he has "been in this country." His multiracial family (Japanese, Vietnamese, English, Chinese, Taiwanese, Jewish, Mexican heritage) is the demographic future the book predicts.
Race is constructed — strangers decide he is foreign from his face and his name, not his birthplace. Ideas are weapons — he treats history itself as a tool that can either erase people or restore them.
Fellow students at the College of Wooster, a not-very-diverse campus.
What did they believe?
That Takaki did not look like an American or have an American-sounding name.
What did they want?
Not stated; their questions ("How long have you been in this country? Where did you learn to speak English?") show what they assumed.
What did they do?
Repeatedly treated a Hawaii-born citizen as a foreigner.
Why does it matter?
This scene is repeated almost word for word by the taxi driver in Chapter 1, decades later. The assumption outlives the people who hold it because the Master Narrative keeps teaching it.
Race is constructed — belonging is assigned by appearance. Ideas are weapons — a version of history taught in school produces the question.
Carol, a white classmate at Wooster who became Takaki's wife; Mr. Rankin, her father.
What did they believe?
Carol's parents believed her relationship with a Japanese American was unacceptable because of his race.
What did they want?
Carol and Takaki wanted to do what was right for them regardless of her parents' objections.
What did they do?
They married; her parents attended reluctantly. Four years later, meeting his first grandchild, Mr. Rankin told Takaki, "You can call me Dad."
Why does it matter?
Takaki uses the story to show that racist attitudes are "not frozen" — a preview of the book's second-semester claim that excluded people can compel change.
Race is constructed — the same man treats Takaki first as a racial problem and then as family; the race did not change, the meaning assigned to it did.
Gladis Williams and the Montgomery Improvement Association youth
A Montgomery student in the 1960s who went after school to the MIA office to organize store protests: mixed groups, "girl/boy, girl/boy," names and next-of-kin recorded before each action.
A Montgomery student in the 1960s who went after school to the MIA office to organize store protests: mixed groups, "girl/boy, girl/boy," names and next-of-kin recorded before each action.
What did they believe?
That jail was "a badge of honor"; "We just had our minds set on freedom, and that was it."
What did they want?
Equal treatment in stores and at lunch counters.
What did they do?
Marched with signs, sat at "Whites Only" counters, and was arrested more times than she could count, for unlawful assembly, demonstrating without a permit, disorderly conduct, and disturbing the peace, "even though we were very orderly."
Why does it matter?
The chapter's closing reminder that the movement was young people's after-school work.
Ideas are weapons — activists changed what arrest meant, turning punishment into pride. Race is constructed — the counter's rule was enforced by police and ended by teenagers.
The Greensboro students, SNCC, and the student who said "little me"
Black students who sat at a "whites only" drugstore lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that spread sit-ins to dozens of cities; one student who said, "I myself desegregated a lunch counter... not some big man, some powerful man, but me, little me."
Black students who sat at a "whites only" drugstore lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that spread sit-ins to dozens of cities; one student who said, "I myself desegregated a lunch counter... not some big man, some powerful man, but me, little me."
What did they believe?
That ordinary people could crumble the walls.
What did they want?
To eat at the counter, and to be respected.
What did they do?
Sat in; "the walls of segregation crumbled."
Why does it matter?
Takaki says the sit-ins produced "an enormous growth in pride and self-respect."
Ideas are weapons — action changes what a person believes about their own power.
President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963; Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general and civil rights supporter, assassinated in 1968; Students for a Democratic Society, a violent offshoot of the antiwar and civil rights movements that carried out bombings.
What did they believe?
Not developed in the chapter.
What did they want?
Not developed.
What did they do?
Mark the violence of the late 1960s alongside the riots in Detroit, Chicago, and Newark.
Why does it matter?
The nightmare Malcolm X named.
Ideas are weapons — the decade's arguments were settled with bullets and bombs as well as laws.
Young militants who raised the call of Black Power in the mid-1960s; Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, shaped by ghetto life, drugs, crime, and prison, assassinated in 1965.
Young militants who raised the call of Black Power in the mid-1960s; Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, shaped by ghetto life, drugs, crime, and prison, assassinated in 1965.
What did they believe?
That Blacks, united by race, should determine their own fate without whites; Malcolm: "I don't see any American dream. I see an American nightmare."
What did they want?
Black liberation on Black terms.
What did they do?
Ended the integrationist alliance and named the frustration behind the Watts riot of 1965.
Why does it matter?
Legal victories left poverty untouched: the right to order a hamburger without the money to buy one.
Ideas are weapons — a competing vision of equality. Economic forces — Black Power arose where integration met an empty wallet. Race is constructed — unity by race as a chosen strategy.
The Congress of Racial Equality; Black and white riders who rode buses together into Southern terminals; Evers, Mississippi's leading Black civil rights activist, murdered in 1963.
The Congress of Racial Equality; Black and white riders who rode buses together into Southern terminals; Evers, Mississippi's leading Black civil rights activist, murdered in 1963.
What did they believe?
In civil disobedience.
What did they want?
Desegregated interstate travel.
What did they do?
Were yanked from buses and beaten by white mobs in front of television cameras.
Why does it matter?
The cameras were the point: the beatings made segregation's violence visible to the nation.
Ideas are weapons — a broadcast image is an argument. Race is constructed — the mob enforces a boundary the law was abandoning.
Survivor of Nazi death camps; speaker at the March on Washington.
What did they believe?
That the most urgent problem of racial injustice was not hatred but silence; that onlookers who do nothing are morally guilty.
What did they want?
Americans to speak.
What did they do?
Represented the Black-Jewish alliance: more than half of white civil rights workers were Jews, who funded and lawyered for the NAACP, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC; James Chaney (Black), Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (Jewish) were murdered registering voters in Mississippi in 1964.
Why does it matter?
Jews who remembered Russian pogroms saw that racism and anti-Semitism were alike.
Ideas are weapons — a comparison of persecutions justifies an alliance. Race is constructed — the alliance later broke over class: Jewish landlords and store owners (30 percent of stores in Harlem and Watts) versus Black tenants.
That discrimination should no longer be "woven into law and habit."
What did they want?
Civil rights and voting rights law.
What did they do?
Outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, created an equal employment commission, removed literacy tests, and required federal contractors to hire minorities.
Why does it matter?
The formal end of Jim Crow.
Race is constructed — law unwrites what law wrote. Economic forces — the laws could not end poverty.
Half of the 300,000 foreign students in the US by 1980 were from China or other Asian countries.
What did they believe?
That education was the door.
What did they want?
Degrees, then jobs, then family.
What did they do?
Traded student visas for immigration papers through skilled work, brought wives and children, and as citizens brought parents and siblings: one student could set a whole family in motion.
Why does it matter?
A route built on education and legal eligibility, unlike the refugee routes that follow.
Economic forces — skilled labor demand opens a legal path. Race is constructed — the same ancestry that was excluded in 1882 is recruited in 1980.
An unnamed member of Congress arguing for immigration reform.
What did they believe?
"Just as we sought to end discrimination in our land through the Civil Rights Act, today we seek by phasing out the national origins quota system to eliminate discrimination in immigration to this nation composed of the descendants of immigrants."
What did they want?
An end to quotas that, for China, Japan, and Black Africa, made "national origin" mean "racial origin."
What did they do?
Supported the 1965 reform that ended the national-origins quota system and expanded opportunities for Asian immigration. Immigration still remained subject to legal limits and admission rules.
Why does it matter?
The 1924 quota table (Chapter 11) is dismantled; Chinese in the US went from 237,000 in 1960 to 812,200 in 1980, and the majority became foreign-born.
Race is constructed — a quota is a racial boundary and can be repealed. Ideas are weapons — the civil rights argument extended to the border.
A married couple who had held professional positions in China.
What did they believe?
That their skills should count.
What did they want?
Work matching their training.
What did they do?
Toiled at menial jobs for lack of English until a federal program (CETA) paid for the wife's English classes and library-science training; she became head librarian of UC Berkeley's Asian American Library.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's example that skill needs a path, and that public support can supply one.
Economic forces — language and access decide what expertise is worth.
One refugee who recalled forced canal digging and farm labor under the new communist government: "Life was very hard for everybody. All had changed!"; more than 277,000 by 1979 who fled in leaky boats through storms and pirates to Thai camps, many of them ethnic Chinese who had faced discrimination in Vietnam, most without English.
What did they believe?
That escape was the only future.
What did they want?
Out.
What did they do?
Waited in camps for Australia, Canada, France, or the United States. By 1985, 643,200 Vietnamese lived in the US; by 2000, 1.4 million, 40 percent in California.
Why does it matter?
A second route: sea, camp, wait.
Economic forces — forced labor at home; wage work abroad changed gender roles as Vietnamese women earned and college-educated daughters refused arranged marriage. Race is constructed — ethnic Chinese pushed out of Vietnam, then slurred in America.
Ten to fifteen thousand military allies and families evacuated before Saigon fell; 86,000 more who climbed into helicopters from the embassy roof with less than ten hours' notice; about 130,000 in all, educated, two-thirds English-speaking, expecting to be gone a month or two.
Ten to fifteen thousand military allies and families evacuated before Saigon fell; 86,000 more who climbed into helicopters from the embassy roof with less than ten hours' notice; about 130,000 in all, educated, two-thirds English-speaking, expecting to be gone a month or two.
What did they believe?
That they would return.
What did they want?
Safety.
What did they do?
Passed through military-base processing stations, were dispersed across the country, and regathered in places like Orange County.
Why does it matter?
War compresses choice: no preparation, no goodbye.
Economic forces — a class of educated refugees rebuilt fastest. Race is constructed — "like earlier Asian immigrants, the Vietnamese did not feel welcome."
New Chinese immigrant women with little English working garment sweatshops; a resident who described them.
What did they believe?
"The conditions in the factories are terrible... They don't protest because they don't know how to talk back and they don't know the law."
What did they want?
A living.
What did they do?
Worked eight to eight, six days, by the piece, at minimum wage.
Why does it matter?
The same sweatshops as Chapter 11, a century later, with the same barrier to resistance: not knowing the rules.
Economic forces — limited options weaken bargaining. Ideas are weapons — knowing rights is what makes protest possible, and its absence is what prevents it.
Afghans who fled the 1979 Soviet invasion as political exiles while the US financed anti-Soviet militias; Rahi, a refugee speaking after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996.
Afghans who fled the 1979 Soviet invasion as political exiles while the US financed anti-Soviet militias; Rahi, a refugee speaking after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996.
What did they believe?
Rahi: "The Taliban are primitive, closed-minded people... Our economy is destroyed, our social life is destroyed, our people's lives are nothing."
What did they want?
To go home; civil war and then the Taliban made it impossible.
What did they do?
Put return plans on hold; after 9/11 and the 2001 invasion, faced anti-Muslim hostility in America.
Why does it matter?
A third route: exile that renewed conflict makes permanent.
Ideas are weapons — Cold War policy created the refugees. Race is constructed — "Muslim" becomes a suspect category after 9/11.
Grandchildren of the internees who, in the 1970s, asked their elders to speak, organized pilgrimages to the camps, and demanded congressional hearings; the Congress that apologized and paid $20,000 per survivor; President Ronald Reagan, who signed the bill and called the internment "a sad chapter" and Japanese Americans "utterly loyal."
What did they believe?
That the silence had to break.
What did they want?
Redress.
What did they do?
Got it, forty-six years after Executive Order 9066.
Why does it matter?
Takaki's point: wartime injustice caused activism a generation later, but only organizing produced the response.
Ideas are weapons — memory made public becomes a claim. Economic forces — $20,000 as the price the nation put on what it took.
A white man in his forties driving Takaki to a teachers' conference on multicultural education in Norfolk, Virginia.
What did they believe?
That Takaki must be an immigrant because of his face; that an American looks white.
What did they want?
To make friendly conversation; he meant no insult.
What did they do?
Asked "How long have you been in this country?" and praised Takaki's "excellent" English.
Why does it matter?
Takaki says it was not the driver's fault: he saw Takaki "through a filter," the Master Narrative learned in school. The exchange happens on the road past Jamestown, where multicultural America began.
Race is constructed — citizenship is invisible; appearance decides who counts as American. Ideas are weapons — the Master Narrative does the driver's thinking for him.
Rodney King, the four police officers, and Richard Rodriguez
King, a Black man beaten by four white Los Angeles officers whose acquittal in April 1992 set off riots that burned thousands of fires and cost $800 million; Rodriguez, a social critic.
King, a Black man beaten by four white Los Angeles officers whose acquittal in April 1992 set off riots that burned thousands of fires and cost $800 million; Rodriguez, a social critic.
What did they believe?
Rodriguez: "Here was a race riot that had no border, a race riot without nationality. And, for the first time, everyone in the city realized—if only in fear—that they were related to one another."
What did they want?
Rodriguez wanted Americans to see the connectedness.
What did they do?
The riots exposed tension between Blacks and Korean store owners and a largely Hispanic set of arrested looters.
Why does it matter?
Economic inequality made the inner city explosive; plants and offices had moved to suburbs and overseas, leaving low-wage service jobs, and Black America split into a rising middle class and a trapped underclass.
Economic forces — deindustrialization as the limit of civil rights. Race is constructed — a multiracial riot in a multiracial city.
The 1.5 million Mexican farmers ruined after 1994 when subsidized US corn undersold their own; Bacon, a journalist.
What did they believe?
Bacon: "They didn't abandon their homes, families, and farms and jobs willingly. They had no other option for survival."
What did they want?
Survival.
What did they do?
More than six million people came to live in the United States during NAFTA's years; migrants crossed freeways and deserts because they knew employers would hire them.
Why does it matter?
A trade agreement as a push factor; the hacendados of Chapter 12 replaced by a subsidy.
Economic forces — policy in Washington empties villages in Oaxaca.
President who delivered "One America in the Twenty-First Century: The President's Initiative on Race" to the graduating class of UC San Diego.
What did they believe?
That America was "born with a Declaration of Independence which asserted that we were all created equal and a Constitution that enshrined slavery"; that the nation could become "the world's first truly multi-racial democracy."
What did they want?
Americans to choose "not two, but many Americas, separate, unequal, and isolated" — or to "draw strength from all our people."
What did they do?
Told the graduates that in half a century "there will be no majority race in America"; named the Native Americans pushed off their land "in the name of freedom," the Japanese Americans who fought while their families were interned, and the Tuskegee Airmen who lost no bombers and then lost their rights at home.
Why does it matter?
A president reciting Takaki's book back to the country.
Ideas are weapons — equal dignity offered as a shared goal against division. Economic forces — expansion "in the name of freedom" had unequal material results.
The author, invited in June 1997 to help President Clinton write a speech on race, one of a group of civil rights leaders and scholars.
What did they believe?
That sometime in the twenty-first century whites will be a minority: "we will all be minorities."
What did they want?
A national story that includes everyone, because "the choices we make will be shaped by our view of our own history."
What did they do?
Supplied the president with the demographic fact and the multicultural frame; closes the book with the argument that a history that leaves out minorities reinforces separation and a history that includes everyone bridges divides.
Why does it matter?
The book's opening question (why did the taxi driver not see an American?) is answered by its method: change the mirror.
Ideas are weapons — historical storytelling is treated as a force that shapes the future. Race is constructed — demography is "redefining who is an American."
Born in California to parents who fled Afghanistan.
What did they believe?
"I am just as much American as I am Afghan"; that Afghans "have kept their uniqueness, the beauty of their culture, and at the same time have thoroughly functioned in today's society. I think that's what integration means."
What did they want?
Integration, not assimilation.
What did they do?
Recalled girls in hijab attacked, Indians shot for "looking" Middle Eastern, mosques burned: "the only time I ever was afraid to be a Muslim."
Why does it matter?
Afghan Americans belong to a South Asian population (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan) that was among the fastest-growing groups in the 1990s: 2.6 million Indian Americans in 2010, second only to 3.2 million Chinese Americans.
Race is constructed — attackers blurred nationality and religion into one target. Ideas are weapons — her definition of integration refuses the forced choice.
An unnamed Afghan American recalling September 11, 2001.
What did they believe?
"Being Afghan American is not what people think it was before; now it's what people want to know about you and who you really are inside, an American or a terrorist."
What did they want?
Not to be forced into that choice.
What did they do?
Watched some Afghans pretend to be Mexican, Greek, or Italian and others hang flags on their homes and businesses.
Why does it matter?
Chapter 1's Afghan section, in a witness's voice.
Race is constructed — a suspect identity assigned without reference to conduct.
Americans demanding arrest, deportation, denial of licenses, jobs, medical care, and schools, bigger fences, and troops at the border; Time's June 18, 2007 cover story arguing for amnesty because undocumented immigrants are "by their sheer numbers undeportable" and "too enmeshed in a healthy U.S. economy to be extracted."
Americans demanding arrest, deportation, denial of licenses, jobs, medical care, and schools, bigger fences, and troops at the border; Time's June 18, 2007 cover story arguing for amnesty because undocumented immigrants are "by their sheer numbers undeportable" and "too enmeshed in a healthy U.S. economy to be extracted."
What did they believe?
Takaki: beneath the nativist speech lies "a fear of the 'browning' of America."
What did they want?
The twelve million undocumented, mostly Mexican, gone or legalized.
What did they do?
After the 2008 recession, Arizona and Utah cracked down; Alabama in 2011 required schools to check students' immigration status.
Why does it matter?
Chapter 12's repatriation logic renewed: demand in good times, expulsion in bad.
Race is constructed — Takaki names the racial anxiety inside the documents debate. Economic forces — recession fuels the crackdown.
Young activists for the DREAM Act, a proposed path to citizenship for those brought into the country illegally as children; Torres, who announced her status at a Charlotte, North Carolina rally in September 2011.
Young activists for the DREAM Act, a proposed path to citizenship for those brought into the country illegally as children; Torres, who announced her status at a Charlotte, North Carolina rally in September 2011.
What did they believe?
"Today is the day that I am coming out of the shadows and saying I exist. I am no longer going to be afraid."
What did they want?
Lawmakers to pass the DREAM Act.
What did they do?
Held a rally of several hundred students; at least ten undocumented immigrants were arrested.
Why does it matter?
The book's last case of the excluded compelling change, still in progress.
Ideas are weapons — public testimony against invisibility, at real risk. Race is constructed — "illegal" as a status assigned to a child.
A journalist who won a 2008 Pulitzer for covering the Virginia Tech shooting; sent by his mother from the Philippines at twelve to live with his grandparents in the US, without documents, for a better life.
A journalist who won a 2008 Pulitzer for covering the Virginia Tech shooting; sent by his mother from the Philippines at twelve to live with his grandparents in the US, without documents, for a better life.
What did they believe?
That Americans "ought to know how many hard-working, successful people are in his situation."
What did they want?
An end to secrecy.
What did they do?
Revealed his status in the New York Times in June 2011 after almost twenty years as an "illegal alien"; Takaki suggests his example may have inspired the student activists.
Why does it matter?
The keyword is "may": Takaki offers a possible influence, not a proven one.
Ideas are weapons — a public confession reframes a category. Race is constructed — a Pulitzer winner is still "illegal."
Director of an organization pushing for tighter immigration control.
What did they believe?
That "our own American young adult college grads are in dire straits in the job market" and that legalizing DREAM students "does actually victimize our own young adults."
What did they want?
The DREAM Act defeated.
What did they do?
Made the job-competition argument the book has recorded since the Irish and the Chinese.
Why does it matter?
The activists answer that there is room in the American dream for people who had no say in how they arrived.
Economic forces — job competition as the standing argument for exclusion. Ideas are weapons — "our own" draws the line of belonging.
