Learn about the Asian American and Pacific Island experience and role in U.S. history with these books from the library.
The Making of Asian America: A History by Erika Lee
Winner of the 2015 -2016 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Adult Non-Fiction from the American Library Association. the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day.
25 Events that Shaped Asian American History: An Encyclopedia of the American by Lan Dong
The book offers a unique look at the Asian American experience, from the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century to the 2017 travel ban. Highlighting events with national and international significance, such as the Central Pacific Railroad Construction, Korean War, and 9/11, it documents the Asian American experience and demonstrates Asian Americans' impact on American life.
A groundbreaking portrait of Vincent Chin and the murder case that took America's Asian American community to the streets in protest of injustice. In 1982, Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting American autoworkers outof their jobs. Anti-Asian American sentiments simmer, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving Vincent Chin-a Chinese American man-beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz. From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry is a searing examination of the killing and the trial and verdicts that followed. This outrage galvanized the Asian American movement and paved the way for a new federal civil rights trial of the case.
Heart of Fire: A Immigrant Daughter's Story by Mazie K. Hirono
Mazie Hirono is one of the most fiercely outspoken Democrats in Congress, but her journey to the U.S. Senate was far from likely. Raised poor on her family's rice farm in rural Japan, Hirono was seven years old when her mother left her abusive husband and sailed with her two elder children to the United States, crossing the Pacific in steerage in search of a better life. Though the girl then known as "Keiko" did not speak English when she entered school in Hawaii, she would go on to hold state and national office, winning election to the U.S. Senate in 2012.
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker (Illustrator, Artist)
A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.
The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is today so pervasive, and seems so foundational, that it can be hard to believe Americans ever thought otherwise. But a 1924 law passed by Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing immigration from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning people from nearly all of Asia. In a compelling narrative with a fascinating cast of characters, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how a small number of lawmakers, activists, and presidents worked relentlessly for the next forty years to abolish the 1924 law and its quotas. Their efforts established the new mythology of the United States as "a nation of immigrants" that is so familiar to all of us now.
Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawai'i by Tom Coffman
In 1893 a small group of white planters and missionary descendants backed by the United States overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and established a government modeled on the Jim Crow South. In Nation Within, Tom Coffman tells the complex history of the unsuccessful efforts of deposed Hawaiian queen Lili‘uokalani and her subjects to resist annexation, which eventually came in 1898. Coffman describes native Hawaiian political activism, the queen's visits to Washington, D.C., to lobby for independence, and her imprisonment, along with hundreds of others, after their aborted armed insurrection. Exposing the myths that fueled the narrative that native Hawaiians willingly relinquished their nation, Coffman shows how Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt conspired to extinguish Hawai‘i's sovereignty in the service of expanding the United States' growing empire.
Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter by Harlan Margaret Van Cao and Lan Cao
This dual first-person memoir is told the Vietnamese-American novelist Lao Cao and her thoroughly American teenage daughter Harlan Margaret Van Cao. Family in Six Tones speaks both to the unique struggles of refugees and to the universal tug-of-war between mothers and daughters. The journey of an immigrant - away from war and loss toward peace and a new life - and the journey of a mother raising a child to be secure and happy are both steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks. Through explosive fights and painful setbacks, mother and daughter search for a way to accept the past and face the future together.
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki
A dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounts the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States--Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others--groups who helped create this country's rich mosaic culture.