Tag: Sikh
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A Sikh American Christmas story from 1911
A Sikh American Christmas story from 1911 In 1911, the San Francisco Call published a Christmas short story about a Sikh immigrant taking in a group of cold and tired railroad workers trudging through the Sierra Nevada mountains. This was a time of significant anti-Indian sentiment, just a few years after the Bellingham Riots, when hundreds…
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The 1940 Singh Census, and the attack on Indian immigrants
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…
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How did South Asian Americans respond to 9/11?
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. After some scrambling, I was able to…
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Berkeley’s first Desi fortune teller was weirder than you think
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.
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How to tie a turban in 1892 San Francisco
“a series of rapid, graceful motions that defy analysis” An 1892 San Francisco paper featured this lovely description of how a Desi man (presumably Sikh) ties a turban: The sight of a man putting on his hat is not usually impressive, but to see an East Indian don his turban before it is rolled is…