The Middle Kingdom Under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781496240484)

2023 Winner of the WHA W. Turrentine Jackson Award
2023 Winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize

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.


Author: Mark T. Johnson
ISBN-10: 1496240480
ISBN-13: 9781496240484
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2024
Pages: 286
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.64d