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Jan 1, 1420
Chinese discover America
Chinese explorers discovered America 72 years before Christopher Columbus landed in 1492. There are reports that Chinese explorers came in 499 A.D., is based upon a curious historical statement in the works of Ma Twan-lin, one of the most notable of Chinese historians. -
Filipinos cross the Pacific
Filipinos were the first Asians to cross the Pacific Ocean as early as 1587, fifty years before the first English settlement of Jamestown was
established. From 1565 to 1815, during the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade, Filipinos were forced to work as sailors and navigators on board Spanish Galleons. They arrived in as Morro Bay, California. A landing party consisting of Filipino seamen, namely Luzon Indios were sent to the California shore to claim the land for the Spanish King. -
Saint Malo settlement, 1763
The Saint Malo settlement was established in 1763 by Filipinos who deserted from Spanish ships during the Manila Galleon Trade. Reasons for their desertion from the ships varied; however their desire to escape the Spanish brutalities is generally regarded as the main reason. They settled in the marshlands of Louisiana where no Spaniards could reach them. The people who settled in the bayous were called Manilamen and later on as Tagalas. They governed themselves and kept their existence a secret -
Chinese sailors first arrive in Hawaii
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First Chinese arrived in the United States
The first Chinese arrived in the United States in 1847 when they were brought by a missionary for schooling in Massachusetts, -
First true Chinese Immigrants
With the push by America to open up China to trade, the year 1848 saw the arrival of silk merchants and the first true immigrants, two men and a woman, to work in mining areas. -
the Chinese community of San Francisco consisted of
4018 men and only 7 women -
Chinese arrive during the Gold Rush
After news of the gold rush had reached economically depressed Canton in south China, tales of riches brought twenty-five thousand Chinese to California. -
first Chinese to graduate from a U.S. college
Yung Wing, one of the three Chinese enrollees in New York schools, graduates from Yale in 1854 and becomes the first Chinese to graduate from a U.S. college. Yung Wing was naturalized as an American citizen on October 30, 1852, and in 1876, he married Mary Kellogg, an American. They had two children. At Yale's centennial commencement in 1876, Yung Wing received an honorary Doctor of Laws. -
The People Vs. Hall
The People of the State of California v. George W. Hall or People v. Hall was an appealed murder case in the 1850s in which the California Supreme Court established that Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants had no rights to testify against white citizens. The opinion was delivered in 1854 by Justice Charles J. Murray with the concurrance of Justice J. Heydenfeldt. The ruling effectively made white violence against Chinese Americans unprosecutable. -
500 Chinese workers arrive in Hawaii
Hawaii sent Dr. William Hillebrand, Royal Commissioner of Immigration, to bring back cheap labor for sugar plantations. Two vessels transported 500 workers, each with a five-year contract to Hawaii. The percentage of Chinese in Hawaii rose from one-tenth of one percent in 1853 to twenty-two percent in 1884. -
Japanese arrive in Hawaii
To maintain a workforce unable to organize effectively against them, plantation managers diversified the ethnicities of their workforce, and in 1868 the first Japanese arrived to work on the plantations.[1] Between 1885 %u2013 1924, 200,000 Japanese people arrived with 55% returning to Japan. -
Burlingame Treaty
The US and China sign the Burlingame-Seward Treaty which legally recognizes the rights of Chinese citizens to immigrate to the US. The Central Pacific Railroad Co. recruits Chinese workers after not being able to find enough among the Irish-American population. 2,000 Chinese railroad workers stage a week long strike. -
Page Law passed by Congress
In 1875, the Page Law was created to prevent woman without any skills or without male chaperones to come to America. Americans claimed that this law was made to lower prostitution rates in America, but was that the whole truth? The main reason why the Page law was made was to limit the Chinese population in America since without any women, how could the Chinese expect to thrive? -
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law passed on May 6, 1882, following revisions made in 1880 to the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. Those revisions allowed the U.S. to suspend immigration, and Congress subsequently acted quickly to implement the suspension of Chinese immigration, a ban that lasted well over 60 years. -
Chinese Expulsion from Tacoma
A mob of whites, led by the Tacoma Mayor Jacob Robert Weisbach and backed by the Tacoma Police, moved into Chinatown and ordered that the residents leave the city. The mob marched the Chinese to a railroad station and stuck them on a train to Portland. In Tacoma, few citizens resisted the mob action as Chinese hatred was widespread.[1] -
Seo Jae Pil - 1st Korean to become a naturalized citizen of the United States.
In the United States, Seo Jai-Pil could attend the Harry Hillman Academy (Wilkes-Barre, PA) thanks to the help of John Welles Hollenback. He began to use the name "Philip Jaisohn" at that time. In 1890, he became the first Korean-American acquiring citizenship of the United States. He studied medicine at the Columbian College (now George Washington University), receiving a medical degree in 1892. -
Geary Act
The Geary Act was a United States law passed in 1892 written by California Congressman Thomas J. Geary. It extended the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by adding onerous new requirements. The law required all Chinese residents of the United States to carry a resident permit. Failure to carry the permit at all times was punishable by deportation or a year at hard labor. In addition, Chinese were not allowed to bear witness in court, and could not receive bail in habeas corpus proceedings. -
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), The Supreme Court, in the Wong Kim Ark case, was called upon to decide whether an American-born person of Chinese ancestry could constitutionally be denied U.S. citizenship and excluded from the country. As a result of Wong Kim Ark's U.S. citizenship being confirmed by the Supreme Court, three of his four sons were subsequently recognized as U.S. citizens and allowed to come to the United States. -
Indians arrive in America
Around 2000 Indians were in the United States in 1899, mostly students or businessmen. Indian immigration to the United States peaked during 1907-1908 and again in 1910, but the numbers were always small in comparison to East Asian immigration. Each year approximately ten to twenty women entered as immigrants, regardless of the number of male immigrants and the percentage of Indian women to men was the lowest for any group immigrating from Asia. -
Bits of Life (Marshall Neilan Productions,for Associated First National Pictures)
ANNA MAY WONG
FIRST ASIAN AMERICAN STAR!
The laundryman's daughter chose two western names to go with her family name, and "Anna May" Wong was born. Although it would be two years before she received on-screen billing for her work, she appeared in the films of several top names of the day, including Sessue Hayakawa, Colleen Moore, and Priscilla Dean. Her father was still a stern presence, though; he insisted that she be accompanied by an adult to the studio. -
Immigration Act of 1924
The Act barred specific origins from the Asia-Pacific Triangle, which included Japan, China, the Philippines, Laos, Siam (Thailand), Cambodia, Singapore (then a British colony), Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Turkey, and Malaysia. Based on the Naturalization Act of 1790, these immigrants, being non-white, were not eligible for naturalization, and the Act forbade further immigration of any persons ineligible to be naturalized. -
Bruce Lee, 11/27/40 - 7/20/73
ruce was invited to star in the Warner Brothers production entitled 'Enter the Dragon' which brought him the super stardom he never had the chance to experience. Bruce Lee's death in 1973 is shrouded in mystery...many theories have been put forward ranging from Ninja Assassins to the Chinese mafia. It's ironic that the country that had originally rejected him now mourned him. But that is sometimes the way of life. We never realize the treasures that some individuals offer us until it is too late -
Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor
On the morning of December 7, 1941, aircraft and midget submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy began a surprise attack on the U.S. The U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor appeared to be utterly unprepared, and the attack effectively drew the United States into World War II. -
Executive Order 9066
The order led to the Japanese American internment in which some 120,000 ethnic Japanese people were held in internment camps for the duration of the war. Of the Japanese interned, 62 percent were Nisei (American-born, second-generation Japanese American) or Sansei (third-generation Japanese American) and the rest were Issei (Japanese immigrants and resident aliens, first-generation Japanese American). -
US Drops Atomic bomb on Hiroshima & Nagasaki
On Monday[10], August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000.[11] Approximately 69% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and 6.6% severely damaged. -
Dalip Singh Saund, A Political Pioneer
Dalip Singh Saund, born in India in 1899, came to the United States in 1920 to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a doctorate degree in mathematics. Despite being highly educated, Saund discovered that his career options were limited due to anti-immigrant feelings in the U.S. In 1949, he and other Indians finally earned the right to become U.S. citizens. -
Hawaii achieves statehood
The Republic of Hawaii was the formal name of Hawaii from 1894 to 1898 when it was run as a republic. The republic period occurred between the administration of the Provisional Government of Hawaii which ended on July 4, 1894 and the adoption of the Newlands Resolution in Congress in which the Republic was annexed to the United States and became the Territory of Hawaii on July 7, 1898. -
USS Maddox fired upon several torpedo boats that had been stalking it in the Gulf of Tonkin.
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Escalation of the Vietnam War officially starts
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Fall of Saigon
The evacuation from Saigon by helicopter of the last U.S. diplomatic, military, and civilian personnel. Frequent Wind was arguably the largest helicopter evacuation in history. It began on April 29, in an atmosphere of desperation, as hysterical crowds of Vietnamese vied for limited seats. -
Southeast Asian Refugees arrive
For 10 years after 1975, 100,000 Southeast Asians per year streamed into the United States. About 45,000 ended up in Washington state, mostly in King and Pierce Counties, and some in Spokane, Yakima, and other cities in Eastern Washington. The exact population is difficult to gauge because of inter-state migration. -
First wave of Cambodians begin to arrive
The Khmer Rouge separated families and tortured political prisoners. Atrocity became commonplace: A million Cambodians were systematically executed, including thousands of educated people and Buddhist monks. A million more died of starvation or disease. Under the Vietnamese, who invaded the country in 1979, the mass executions were halted. But living conditions remained abysmal. Cambodians, along with Laotians and hill tribe refugees, came to the U.S. in two waves, the first in 1975, -
Laotians being arriving
During the 1960s, the U.S. fought a secret war in Laos to sever the North Vietnamese supply line known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By 1970, two thirds of the country had been massively bombed, causing widespread environmental destruction and the flight of 600,000 refugees, 20 percent of the total population of Laos. Immigration of the indigenous lowland Lao closely followed that of the Cambodians, most of them arriving in the U.S. from 1979 to 1982. Laotians number about 7,000 in the Puget Sound. -
Second wave of Cambodian Refugees
The second and larger wave of Cambodian Refugees arrived in the early 1980s. Many in the second wave were farmers from small villages with little or no education or knowledge of Western culture. Between 1982 and 1988 about 3,000 Cambodians arrived in Washington state, increasing the total number of Cambodians to 10,000, the majority living in King and Pierce Counties. -
Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
In 1980, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to study the matter. Some opponents of the redress movement argued that the commission was ideologically biased; 40% of the commission staff was of Japanese ancestry. On February 24, 1983, the commission issued a report entitled Personal Justice Denied, condemning the internment as "unjust and motivated by racism rather than real military necessity". -
Eugene H. Trinh
Eugene Huu-Chau "Gene" Trinh (born on September 14, 1950, in Saigon, South Vietnam) is the first Vietnamese-American to travel into outer space.
Special honors
- Full tuition Scholarship (Columbia University)
- Sheffield Fellowship (Yale University)
- Group Achievement award NASA for flight experiments
- Science Achievement award for Principal Investigator team NASA
- NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal
- NASA Flight Medal -
Elaine Lan Chao
born March 26, 1953) currently serves as the 24th United States Secretary of Labor in the Cabinet of President George W. Bush. She is the first Chinese American , and the first Asian-American woman to be appointed to a President's cabinet in American history. Chao is the President's only original cabinet member, making her the longest serving cabinet member during President Bush's administration. She is married to U.S.Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), the current U.S. Senate Minority Leade -
Norman Mineta
14th United States Secretary of Transportation
In office January 25, 2001 %u2013 July 7, 2006
Mineta was born in San Jose, California, to Japanese immigrant parents who were not U.S. citizens at that time. During World War II the Mineta family was interned for years in the Heart Mountain internment camp near Cody, Wyoming, along with thousands of other Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans.
While detained in the camp, Mineta, a Boy Scout. -
Kalpana Chawla, 17 March 1962 %u2013 1 February 2003
Chawla joined the NASA astronaut corps in March 1995 and was selected for her first flight in 1998 Her first space mission began on November 19, 1997 as part of the six astronaut crew that flew the Space Shuttle Columbia flight STS-87. Chawla was the first Indian-born woman and the second person of Indian origin to fly in space, following cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma who flew in 1984 in a Soviet spacecraft. -
First Chinese Arrive in Hawaii
The Chinese in Hawaii
By most accounts, Hawaii's first contact with China occurred in 1787 as retold very well in First Chinese in Hawaii. An English merchant stopped in Hawaii on his way from North America to China. On their return in 1789, he again stopped in Hawaii, bringing with him fifty Chinese carpenters, several of whom are said to have stayed on the Big Island "under the charge of Kamehameha the Great".
