Project Questions

1. How closely does James Blaine echo Denis Kearney and H. G. Knight’s complaints about the Chinese?
2. Blaine, Kearney, and Knight contend that either the white man or the Chinese must dominate the Pacific Slope. None of these men appears to consider that the two groups might coexist peacefully. How do the perspectives on the different races in America learning to live together presented in the Thomas Nast cartoon and Huang Zunxian poem differ from these sources?
3. Central Question: What factors contributed to the popularity of anti-Chinese sentiment in the nineteenth century and the eventual abandonment by the United States of its policy of admitting immigrants irrespective of race, nationality, or country of origin?