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
Flora Belle Jan
Chinese American journalist and poet Flora Belle Jan in the 1930s. “My parents have wanted me to grow up a good Chinese girl,” she said, “but I am an American and I can’t accept all the old Chinese ways and ideas.
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Anna May Wong Quarter
Anna May Wong’s inspiring legacy includes becoming the first Asian American to be featured on US currency when the US Mint issued a quarter bearing her name and likeness in October 2022.
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Video
Dangerous to Know
Anna May Wong starring opposite Akim Tamiroff in Paramount Pictures’ Dangerous to Know (1938). Wong relentlessly pushed for greater representation and fewer stereotypical roles for Asian Americans in film.
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King of Chinatown
Acknowledged as Hollywood’s first Asian American film star, Anna May Wong had top billing in 1939’s King of Chinatown. Disillusioned by Hollywood’s practice of “yellowface,” or casting white actors for Asian roles, she left the US for a time to work in Europe.
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Anna May Wong’s Certificate of Identity
Anna May Wong’s 1924 US Certificate of Identity, at age nineteen, indicating her as “native.” Red certificates were issued to Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans entering the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
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Anna May Wong
Born in Los Angeles in 1905, Anna May Wong (born Wong Liu Tsong) had a storied career that spanned over sixty films. In the face of racial discrimination in Hollywood, she rose to international fame as a film and TV icon.
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Chinese American Boys In Chinatown
Chinese American boys in a San Francisco Chinatown parade along Sixth Street, c. 1936.
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Video
Arrest in Chinatown
This 1897 film shows the arrest of a Chinese man in San Francisco Chinatown, watched by a crowd of onlookers.
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Interior of Angel Island Immigration Station
Chinese detainees on Angel Island painted and carved poems of despair on barracks walls. More than 200 of them are still visible today
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A Chinese Exclusion Act Coaching Book
A study aid or coaching guide to successfully pass through US immigration interrogation from the 1920s found among the papers of Fook Wing Chung.
