"John Doe Chinaman": Chinese Life under American Racial Law

The Western History Lecture Series presents Beth Lew-Williams, Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Lew-Willam’s lecture, "John Doe Chinaman": Chinese Life under American Racial Law will be held on Thursday, January 29, 2026. 

Legal discrimination against Chinese people in the United States began in 1852, when California passed a tax on foreign gold miners that was explicitly designed to exploit Chinese labor. Over the next seventy years, officials in California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states instituted more than five thousand laws that marginalized and controlled their Chinese residents. Drawing on dozens of archives across the US West, Beth Lew-Williams reveals the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life.

Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. She is the prize-winning author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018). 

Her second book, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, September 2025) was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Drawing on dozens of archives across the US West, the book reveals the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life.

Lew-Williams earned her A.B. from Brown University and her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her teaching at Princeton has been recognized with the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and she was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2024. In 2025, she received the Dan David Prize for the study of the human past.