Asian Americans have lived in the United States for over one-and-a-half centuries: Chinese and Asian Indians since the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese since the late nineteenth century, and Koreans and Filipinos since the first decade of the twentieth century (an earlier group of Filipinos had settled near New Orleans in the late eighteenth century). Because of exclusion laws that culminated with the 1924 Immigration Act, however, the Asian American population was relatively miniscule before the mid-twentieth century. As late as 1940, for example, Asian immigrants and their descendants constituted considerably less than 1 percent (0.0019) of the United States population. In contrast, in Hawai'i, which was then a territory and therefore excluded from United States population figures, 58 percent of the people in 1940 were of Asian descent.
Asian American" is a relatively recent term that was first used by non-Asians and then adopted by Asian Americans themselves during the late 1960s in the heyday of ethnic and political activism that emerged on the heels of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Further energized by the anti-Vietnam War protests, activists in communities and on college campuses rejected the category of "Orientar' and instead self-identified as Asian American. 1 Encompassing highly diverse ethnic peoples descended from immi grant forbears from vast and varied regions of the world, this social con struct is ambiguous at best. Yet notwithstanding its dubious nature, the Asian American grouping has persisted, both to the detriment and benefit of the people so classified. On the one hand it has homogenized and essentialized the diversity within; on the other it has facilitated coalition build ing for political and economic (e.g., federal funding) benefits. Because the rate of immigration from Asia has multiplied in recent decades, Asian Americans have become one of the fastest-growing groups in the country. As a result, they have been increasingly visible in the pop ular mind. But despite their previous invisibility, Asian Americans have had a long history in the United States. As early as the 1500s some Chinese, and in the 1700s some Filipinos and Asian Indians, had arrived in North America. 2 Asian American history can be divided roughly into four periods: from 1850 to 1940, a time of immigration restrictions and discrimination; the World War II period that was dominated by the incarceration of Japanese
The English-only effort was an integral part of the Americanization crusade that swept the nation during and after World War I. Underlying the crusade was the doctrine of Anglo-Saxon superiority-the conviction that American traits derived from the English, and that the future of American democracy depended upon the survival of the English language and the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon "race." Fueled by a distrust of "foreign" practices, the crusade developed into a massive effort to imbue immigrants with Anglo-American ways. Across the country, evening classes in English, .civics, and American history focused on adult immigrants, while public schools concentrated on their children through courses in American history and government, patriotic rituals as daily flag salutes and observances of national holidays, and English-only instruction. By 1923, thirty-four states required that English be the language of instruction in public elementary schools. 1 On the mainland Americanizers focused on southern and eastern European immigrants and their children. In the Territory of Hawaii they concentrated on the Japanese. This difference proved to be crucial in differentiating the Americanization campaign in Hawaii from its mainland counterpart. While much of the rhetoric in Hawaii echoed that on the mainland, in the Territory overtones of race and power gave the campaign a distinctive twist.
I am a narrative historian. By narrative, I mean the telling of a story to explain and analyze events and human agency in order to increase understanding. As a narrative historian, I have not made extensive use of theory in my analysis of past events. In fact, in the past I consistently rejected theory, considering it more of a hindrance than a help.The historian Geoffrey Roberts stated, “History is frequently labelled an idiographical discipline as opposed to a nomothetic one, that is, a discipline whose knowledge objects are particular, individual, and specific rather than classes of phenomena which are abstracted and subsumed in generalisations about trends, patterns and causal determinations.” In this vein, it was my view—as Peter Burke noted—that history examines particulars and “attend to concrete detail,” while theory attends to “general rules and screen[s] out the exceptions.”
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