KQED: Stanford Project Unearths Personal Histories of Chinese Railroad Workers

Recently, the local National Public Radio affiliate station KQED’s program, Forum, hosted a discussion on the history of the Chinese railroad workers as the 150th anniversary of when Chinese workers began to work on the transcontinental railroad:

calisphere_frank_leslie_980_520“The Transcontinental Railroad has been dubbed a feat of 19th century engineering and has been credited with opening California up to trade. Despite the importance of the project, little is known about the individual lives of the 12,000 Chinese immigrants who laid the track between Sacramento and the Sierra Nevada. Now, 150 years after Chinese workers began working on the railroad, we look back on the contributions of those workers and learn about the Stanford project that’s piecing together their personal stories.”

The program guests included:

You can also download the mp3 instead of streaming the program – download here (23.6 MB).

I’ve been impressed with the amount of coverage the Chinese railroad workers have been getting this past year, especially with the Chinese railroad workers being inducted into the U.S. Labor Hall of Honor earlier this May.

 

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About John

I'm a Taiwanese-American and was born & raised in Western Massachusetts, went to college in upstate New York, worked in Connecticut, went to grad school in North Carolina and then moved out to the Bay Area in 1999 and have been living here ever since - love the weather and almost everything about the area (except the high cost of housing...)
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