Nineteenth Century America
Strangers in the Land
I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a…
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The Celestials’ Last Game
I’ve been following Ben Railton on social media for a long time now, first on the site formerly known as Twitter (back in the good old days) and now on Bluesky, where he is @americanstudier.bluesky.social Among other things, he curates a fabulous list, #SundayScholar, of people to follow and stuff to read. I always find…
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The Miniature Painter Revealed: A Q & A with Kathleen Lagone
The Miniature Painter Revealed: Amalia Kussner’s Gilded Age Pursuit of Fame and Fortune by Kathleen Lagone is another story of a woman who was famous in her own time and subsequently forgotten. No other female portrait artist had the notoriety or esteemed clientele that Amalia Kussner enjoyed. From the mid-1890s to 1910, having a Kussner…
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