The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky

2023 Winner of the WHA W. Turrentine Jackson Award 2023 Winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, when Chinese immigrants made up more than 10 percent of the territorys population, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the regions development. But this population, so crucial to Montanas history, remains underrepresented in historical accounts, and popular attention to the Chinese in Montana tends to focus on sensational elementsexoticizing Chinese Montanans and distancing their lived experiences from our modern understanding. The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky seeks to recover the stories of Montanas Chinese population in their own words and deepen understanding of Chinese experiences in Montana by using a global lens. Mark T. Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English here for the first time. These collections, spanning the 1880s through the 1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chinese community facedfrom family members back in China and from non-Chinese Montanansas economic and cultural disturbances complicated acceptance of Chinese residents in the state. Through their own voices Johnson reveals the agency of Chinese Montanans in the history of the American West and China.