Mapping anti-Chinese Violence and Newspaper Circuits with Ai-Assisted GIS, 1853–1915

Kevin Hegg, James Madison University

This presentation maps the rise, peak, and decline of anti-Chinese lethal violence in the United States between 1853 and 1915 and argues that these incidents formed part of a broader Western regime of racial terror that I call “John Crow.” Drawing on a newly extended dataset of anti-Chinese lynchings and related episodes of mob violence, I trace the geographic expansion of this violence from Gold Rush California into the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountain West, and, on three occasions, the Mississippi Delta. The first Delta case took place in 1885; the other two in the early twentieth century. They mark a revealing moment of convergence between John Crow and Jim Crow. Although the two regimes pursued different ends, expulsion in the West and subordination in the South, they relied on strikingly similar mechanics: criminal allegations, custodial vulnerability, mob seizure, public execution, and impunity. The presentation also examines how anti-Chinese hostility circulated through a national network of white-owned newspapers in the late 19th century. Reports of lynchings traveled alongside racist jokes, visual and verbal memes, and the viral slogan “The Chinese Must Go!” This combined approach allows me to map not only violence on the ground but also the print circuits through which racialized exclusion was repeated, normalized, and made portable across regions. Finally, the presentation reflects on methodology. Earlier in my career, I relied on ArcGIS and Tableau for making maps. In my current work, I am using AI coding assistants to generate web-appropriate and publication-ready maps from structured datasets and iterative natural-language prompts. This workflow has greatly reduced production time while allowing for finer control over design, including an interactive map with an integrated timeline. AI-assisted cartography can expand what historians can do with spatial evidence, while still requiring close human judgment about interpretation, emphasis, and historical meaning.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 213. Mapping Racial Violence