The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky

A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana

Mark T. Johnson

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496231918
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

2023 Caroline Bancroft History Prize from the Denver Public Library
2023 WHA W. Turrentine Jackson Award From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, when Chinese immigrants made up more than 10 percent of the territory’s population, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. But this population, so crucial to Montana’s history, remains underrepresented in historical accounts, and popular attention to the Chinese in Montana tends to focus on sensational elements—exoticizing Chinese Montanans and distancing their lived experiences from our modern understanding. The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky seeks to recover the stories of Montana’s Chinese population in their own words and deepen understanding of Chinese experiences in Montana by using a global lens. Mark T. Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English here for the first time. These collections, spanning the 1880s through the 1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chinese community faced—from family members back in China and from non-Chinese Montanans—as economic and cultural disturbances complicated acceptance of Chinese residents in the state. Through their own voices Johnson reveals the agency of Chinese Montanans in the history of the American West and China.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Chinese Names and Transliterations
• 1. Telling the History of Montana’s Chinese Pioneers
• 2. Pressures on Butte’s Chinese Residents, 1880s–1920s
• 3. Chinese Resistance to the 1892 Geary Act
• 4. The Chinese Empire Reform Association
• 5. The Anti-American Boycott of 1905
• 6. Chinese Religious and Burial Practices
• 7. The Changing Status of Chinese Women, 1860s–1950s
• 8. Cold War Fears and Chinese Communities, 1930s–1950s
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Anti-Chinese Actions in Montana, 1866–1909
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Mark T. Johnson