19th Century Chinese and Japanese Settlements in California: America's Pacific Founding Fathers

"This book follows Asian-American history in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range in northeastern California. When one thinks of ethnic Chinese communities throughout North America today, one may consider urban locations such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Vancouver. One would not ordinarily think of Chinese communities in remote rural areas. But during the late 1800s and early 1900s , many small towns and cities throughout northern California had their own well-established Chinese communities. ...This book offers the reader an opportunity to learn about the many small rural Chinatowns that proliferated across northern California in the late 1800s and early 1900s as well the first Japanese settlement near Coloma in 1869. There were at least thirty of these rural Chinese settlements; I have chosen to write about ten of these as representative samples of their great variety and legacies." -from The Author's "Introduction"