On January 28, 2021, Doc Chat kicked off its Spring 2021 season by exploring the history of Chinese railroad workers through photography. 

An ongoing series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Thirteen, NYPL's Zulay Chang and public historian Richard Cheu analyzed several 19th-century photographs related to the construction and completion of the transcontinental railroad, including a stereograph depicting Chinese railroad workers from NYPL's Photography Collection, contextualizing these images in the business of 19th-century photography and the history of Chinese Americans.

Doc Chat Episode 13: Chinese Railroad Workers in Stereoscopic Photography from The New York Public Library on Vimeo.

A transcript of this event is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode. 

Episode Thirteen: Primary Sources

They also looked at two photographs from the collections of the Oakland Museum of California: 

Andrew J. Russell, Chinese Laying Last Rail, 1869, H69.459.2426, Oakland Museum of California. 

Andrew J. Russell, East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail, 1869, H69.459.2030, Oakland Museum of California. 

Episode 10: Reading and Resources 

Secondary Sources

Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). 

Leigh Gleason, “Canvassed and Delivered: Direct Selling at Keystone View Company, 1898-1910” (Diss., De Montfort University, 2018).

Denise Khor, “Archives, Photography, and Historical Memory: Tracking the Chinese Railroad Worker in North America,” Southern California Quarterly 98, no. 4 (2016): 429-56.

Richard Rayner, The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California (W.W. Norton and Company, 2008).

Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (University of Hong Kong Press, 2013).

John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Back to The Basics: Who Is Researching and Interpreting For Whom?” The Journal of American History 81, No. 3 (1994). 

John Kuo Wei Tchen, “New York Chinatown History Project” History Workshop 24 (1987): 158-61. 

Richard White. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). 

Online Teaching Resources

Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University

Chinese in California Virtual Collection: Selections from the Bancroft Library

Videos

Richard A. Cheu, How the Chinese Built the Transcontinental Railroad and America (Museum of the Chinese in America, 2019). 

Richard A. Cheu, Debunking Myths About Chinese Railroad Workers (Leominster Public Library, 2019). 

Websites and other resources

The E. & H.T. Anthony Companies

The National Stereoscopic Association, list of E. & H.T. Anthony stereoviews and item numbers

Andrew J. Russell Stereograph Catalog

Biography of Andrew J. Russell

Stereograph Cards from the Library of Congress

Robert N. Dennis Stereograph Collection from NYPL Digital Collections

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