A new history dataset shows the impact of immigration restrictions — I’ve been analyzing U.S. Census data to understand the history of Sikh and other South Asian Americans, and I’m excited to release a public dataset of almost a thousand people with the last name “Singh” living in the United States in 1940. (The source data is available on Github in…

Students from India, China, Japan, and Siam came together in 1907 Berkeley, California — The history of Asian American organizing is often told through the lens of 1960s movements, like the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), founded by UC Berkeley students in 1968. I recently discovered UC Berkeley’s Oriental Students’ Association, formed in 1907, over sixty years before the founding of the AAPA.

I discovered a strange World War 1 draft card. The mystery of Natio Lee led me back to an Indian orphanage. — I spent the first year of COVID-19 trying to uncover the stories of early South Asians in Berkeley, California. Many of them were UC Berkeley students, Ghadar revolutionaries, or Punjabi laborers. But then I came across a particularly confusing 1917 World War I draft card:

I discovered these original emails from September 2001 — Looking at old letters and documents can help us understand how people were affected by larger historical events. I’m a community-based historian, so when I heard that Yahoo Groups was getting deleted, I started worrying about the destruction of archives. …

Boor Singh took on cops, dog breeders, racists, and clairvoyants — Boor Singh immigrated to California in 1907, married a Black or mixed-race woman, became a fortune teller, and lived a life full of drama and tragedy. I’ve spent months trying to piece together his story, and the more I look, the stranger it gets.

Concerned neighbors ignore him, and keep working to solve local homelessness crisis — Fremont, California sits at the north end of Silicon Valley, and is the second largest city in Alameda County. …

Babu Bheem Roy’s terrible crime in 1910s California — and the survivor who took him on — Babu Bheem Roy was born in Gorakhpur, India in 1869, passed through England, and immigrated to the United States at age 20, in 1889. Over the next quarter century, he would marry an Irish woman, become a single father, work as a traveling preacher lecturing on India, marry again, get…

Was he the first South Asian in Northern California? — South Asians started slowly trickling into Northern California during the Gold Rush. We recently found evidence of a South Asian man who lived and died in 1850 San Francisco. In my research, this is the earliest evidence I’ve seen of South Asians in Northern California. In May 1850, a San…

We’ve been finding records of early Indian immigrants to San Francisco advertising for jobs. Here are some of the ads we found. 1899: Hotel or pantry work “A young East Indian would like a position as porter in hotel or pantry work. Address box 2275, Call office.” 1905: Languages and cookery