Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans | 
 enlarge | Author: Jean Pfaelzer
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 68234
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.1
ISBN: 0520256948
Dewey Decimal Number: 979.4004951
EAN: 9780520256941
ASIN: 0520256948
Publication Date: August 1, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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Product Description
Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants' wives were violently loaded onto railroad cars or steamers, marched out of town, or killed.
But the Chinese fought back--with arms, strikes, and lawsuits and by flatly refusing to leave. When red posters appeared on barns and windows across the United States urging the Chinese to refuse to carry photo identity cards, more than one hundred thousand joined the largest mass civil disobedience to date in the United States. The first Chinese Americans were marched out and starved out. But even facing brutal pogroms, they stood up for their civil rights. This is a story that defines us as a nation and marks our humanity.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 The Ethnic Cleansing That Failed... July 24, 2008
34 out of 35 found this review helpful
...and thank goodness! The efforts to expel by violence and exclude by law the Chinese from joining the great migration of peoples from the "Old World to the "New" seem, from our vantage point in 2008, to have been as unsuccessful as they were vicious. May it ever be so!
I picked this book up because amazon's marvelous computer "recommended" it to me after I reviewed the book "Island", about the INS quarantine barracks on Angel Island in SF Bay. This is a more vivid account of the violent campaign waged after the building of the transcontinental railroad, to drive the Chinese out of rural America and into urban ghettoes, to deny them the rights and opportunities of ordinary citizens, and even to deprive them of life. It's based on, and includes, some powerful first-person narratives, and it reaches well beyond the Bay Area in the agricultural counties of California, Oregon, and Washington.
It also includes vivid accounts of Chinese resistance to ethnic cleansing, from evasion to self-defense to legal activism. These acts of resistance will be news to most readers, including American-born Chinese. They were exciting news to me.
One previous review, by Dr. Dolhenty, which praises the book's even-handedness and gives it five stars, also contains some amazing statements concerning the possibility that such information could fuel an imagined "Blame America" sentiment. The doctor proceeds to justify America, not absolutely but relatively, using the argument that "we" weren't nearly as bad as X, Y, & Z. So no apologies needed! We were only doing what "everyone" did in those days; we just weren't as good at it! What an incredibly infantile self-justification! Just come out and say, I chopped down the cherry tree, and stop equivocating! Or have we degenerated so far from the forthrightness that Parson Weems attributed to our Founding Father? If so, Americans should give up the study of history forevermore, since history is only useful to peoples who can acknowledge their past mistakes with dignity.
Well-written, painful to read! It should be homework for citizenship tests.
 A sad, but true history. October 24, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Driven Out is a disturbing but detailed look at a sad chapter in American history. The pictures and quotes enliven the chapters and give an acurate account of the early chinese pioneers in our west. It shows the effects of the bizzare sounding laws and the exclusion acts of the 1880s. It gives a particularly intense picture of the plight of chinese women who were singled out for white agression as part of a national policy to keep the chinese as temporary workers. It is a history I never heard in school and one we should all be more familiar with today. It lends itself to discussions of immigration as well as racism and feminism. The rather academic style is lighted by stories of specific people and incidents. It is well worth reading.
Understanding History's Complexities October 13, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
The exclusion of the Chinese in the United States during the nineteenth century was one of the most pivotal events in American history. In her extensive narrative, DRIVEN OUT: THE FORGOTTEN WAR AGAINST CHINESE AMERICANS, Jean Pfaelzer revisits this part of history that many do not know had existed. The book examines pai hua, "driven out," how the Chinese were intentionally forced to leave the United States through cruel, violent, and unconstitutional tactics, which specifically occurred in California and Washington, from the years 1850-1906. Interestingly, Pfaelzer succinctly parallels these acts to other atrocities of ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred in world history and years later within twentieth century and current conflicts, from the Holocaust of the Jews in World War II to Rwanda.
Deriving from California archives as well her personal insight as a young scholar, Pfaelzer shows the importance of revisiting this particular historical event. From her own personal experience in Humboldt County, California in 1974, she observed the absence of Asian American students, where she learned 90 years earlier that the Chinese were driven out of Eureka, California (xxvii). After years of intense inquiry, her curiosity led her to the Bancroft Library on the campus of UC Berkley and many other archival repositories that possessed an immense amount of information pertaining to the topic. Within the chapter entitled "A Litany of Hate," the pages are literally the dark pages of the book, and may be an eye-opening experience for those not familiar with this part of history; it is a visual and chronological synopsis that synthesizes Pfaelzer's narrative, and shows the arrant racism that existed toward the Chinese during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and as a fact, they were the only ethnic group excluded and limited to entry and stay in the United States because of their ethnicity.
The most important point that Pfaelzer asserts is that whenever this part of history is told it is far too often that the violence of the event is magnified rather than the resolution of the conflict. Pfaelzer shows with the mention of several court cases how the Chinese attempted to defend and protect their rights by using, interpreting, and challenging state laws and the US Constitution to undo unjust and unconstitutional laws and acts, the Geary Act and Expulsion Act of 1882, that hindered their way of life in spite of the odds that were against them. Their stories may shock readers, but they will reveal the extreme intolerance they endured.
DRIVEN OUT is an important part of American history. The interesting part about studying history is that inspiration usually inculcated by present events and past memories. Indeed, I did not learn this history in high school, but I wrote a paper about this topic in college several years ago, which helped me to understand the never-ending complexities in American history. Hence this book has furthered enriched my learning experience, and is highly recommended for supplementary reading when studying ethnic and immigration history.
It's about time!!!! September 28, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's about time to reveal the vast injustice that the American Society bestowed toward Chinese since the early days. Unfortunately, the prejudice reserved mostly for Chinese among other Asian country is once again renewed with a vengeance now that China had emerged as a rising star. What a shame!!!
Really Forgotten July 4, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a pretty good history of an essentially unknown, and very shameful, episode in the history of the US. The mistreatment of Indians and Africans is well-known, but the horrific treatment of the Chinese is neglected in almost all US history books. This book brings to light little-known actions by local governments and "civilians."
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