Table of Contents
Third Series, Vol. 81, No. 2, Spring 2022
“Pioneers, Sunday Schoolers, and Laundrymen: Chinese Immigrants in Iowa in the Chinese Exclusion Era, 1870–1890”
Anthony J. Miller
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.
"'A Flight of Alien, Unclean Birds': The Mobility of Hobo Labor in Iowa 1870s–1910s"
Nathan Tye
Nathan Tye explores the place of hobos in Iowa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that transitory workers’ illicit rail travel, apparent disconnection from society, and sudden arrival and departure unsettled rural and urban Iowans and that hobos’ efforts to advocate and organize publicly elicited strong responses from legislators, law enforcement, editorialists, and even the Iowa Supreme Court.