Search the Media Repository
Discover the curated images, videos, and primary sources featured throughout Foundations and Futures
History is more than just text on a page; it is the photographs, voices, and artifacts of the people who lived it. The images and recordings featured across Foundations and Futures are part of a meticulously curated media repository. Whether you are building a lesson plan or investigating an artifact, you can use this database to trace the provenance of our media: discover who created an asset, the historical context behind it, and how it can be used to bring Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences into your classroom.
Multimedia
Chapters
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Image
Wong Kim Ark ID
A photo of Wong Kim Ark from a federal investigation case
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Image
Of Course He Wants to Vote the Democratic Ticket!
An illustration from Harper’s Weekly (1876) illustrates the intimidation, suppression, and outright violence that Black voters faced during the Reconstruction Era and after.
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Image
The First Duty
The cover of Puck magazine from 1900 reads, “That dragon must be killed before our troubles can be adjusted. If you don’t do it I shall have to.”
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The Yellow Terror in all His Glory
“The Yellow Terror in All His Glory,” an 1899 cartoon about the Boxer Rebellion in China, helped to inflame Western rhetoric about a “Yellow Peril.”
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Text
SF Mayor Wants Exclusion
San Francisco mayor Eugene Schmitz ran on an anti-Japanese campaign. The segregation of Japanese American students in separate schools led to the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907.
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Image
What Shall We Do With Our Boys?
Political cartoons in the late nineteenth century depicted Chinese migrants as diseased, dangerous, and sinister. This cartoon by George Frederick Keller was created in the same year as the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and shows a caricatured Chinese labor as an economic threat.
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Video
Launch of Vincent Chin Institute
On April 26, 2023, Congresswoman Judy Chu and other leaders celebrated the launch of the Vincent Chin Institute, established to fight hate through multiracial solidarity, education, advocacy networks and telling our own stories—all legacies of the Vincent Chin movement.
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Video
History’s Importance In Fight For Justice
Author Helen Zia (lower right) describes the historic patterns that have continued during the COVID-19 pandemic in this Washington Post video.
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Video
History of Anti-Asian Rhetoric
During the dual pandemics of COVID and anti-Asian hate, many Asian Americans spoke out. Author and historian Erica Lee (top right) speaks in a Washington Post video on the history and contemporary rise of racist incidents and violence.
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Vincent Chin Plaque
On Woodward Avenue, a main thoroughfare of greater Detroit, this historic plaque honors the memory of Vincent Chin in the median at the intersection of Nine Mile Road in Ferndale, across from the building Vincent had worked as a waiter.
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Text
The Vincent Chin Legacy Guide (Page 4)
Though Vincent Chin’s case is a landmark of anti-Asian violence, many other Asian Americans have been harmed, with a few more listed here. Even today, racism against Asians is often denied and ignored by authorities, media and society in general.
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The Vincent Chin Legacy Guide (Page 3)
Though Vincent Chin’s case is a landmark of anti-Asian violence, many other Asian Americans have been harmed, with a few more listed here. Even today, racism against Asians is often denied and ignored by authorities, media and society in general.
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The Vincent Chin Legacy Guide (Page 2)
Though Vincent Chin’s case is a landmark of anti-Asian violence, many other Asian Americans have been harmed, with a few more listed here. Even today, racism against Asians is often denied and ignored by authorities, media and society in general.
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Text
The Vincent Chin Legacy Guide (Page 1)
Though Vincent Chin’s case is a landmark of anti-Asian violence, many other Asian Americans have been harmed, with a few more listed here. Even today, racism against Asians is often denied and ignored by authorities, media and society in general.
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Video
University Chancellor Mocks Asian People During Graduation
In December 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Purdue University Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon mocks Asian people during his commencement speech, as his board of trustees laughs in response. As CNN This Morning reports, after the video went viral, Keon apologized.
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Text
Timeline of Anti-Asian Violence
Created by One Nation Commission, this timeline traces notable dates in the long thread of anti-Asian violence and prejudice that preceded the massive wave of hate that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, when Asian American communities were blamed for the virus.
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Video
Interview with Juror for Civil Rights Trial
The foreperson who headed the twelve-person jury of the federal civil rights trial in Detroit gives the reasons for finding Ronald Ebens guilty of violating Vincent Chin’s civil rights.
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1983 Rally in Detroit
The 1983 Asian American-led rally had multiracial, cross-cultural, and inter-faith support, including (from left to right) Winston Lang, NAACP Detroit; Horace Sheffield Jr., founder of Detroit Association of Black Organizations; attorney Liza Chan; and Kin Yee, first president of American Citizens for Justice.
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Text
The American Citizens for Justice (Page 4)
The newly formed pan-Asian civil rights organization reached out to every Asian ethnic group it could find. Within weeks, the broad list of endorsing groups showed that a multi-ethnic, pan-Asian advocacy movement under the umbrella concept “Asian American” was possible.
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The American Citizens for Justice (Page 3)
The newly formed pan-Asian civil rights organization reached out to every Asian ethnic group it could find. Within weeks, the broad list of endorsing groups showed that a multi-ethnic, pan-Asian advocacy movement under the umbrella concept “Asian American” was possible.






