Pioneers, Sunday Schoolers, and Laundrymen: Chinese Immigrants in Iowa in the Chinese Exclusion Era, 1870-1890

Abstract

ANTHONY MILLER examines Iowa's earliest Chinese settlers in the late nineteenth century—a period of heightened anti-Chinese sentiment that led to the Chinese Exclusion Acts. By attending to the first generation of immigrants from China, Miller both introduces distinct new voices that complicate Iowa's immigration history, and also situates Iowa's Chinese pioneers firmly in the urban and coastally dominated field of Sino-American history.