history nerdery

OMG I love doing research for comics it's sooooo much fun.

I'm looking at Wong Kim Ark stuff and then I found this great website on Look Tin Eli (he's known as Look Tin Sing in the case precedent that was cited in the Wong Kim Ark case) and since Wong Kim Ark got his funding for the court case from the Six Companies in 1894, and Look Tin Eli was a big part of the Six Companies by 1907.... maybe they met each other? OMG what if Look Tin Eli was like "we gotta fund this court case"

30 min ago I had no idea who this guy was and now I'm like *_* broooomance.... (except that Look is obviously much wealthier than Wong -- all the case files are like "Wong is a *laborer*", whereas Look starts a bank)

God, the 1880s and 1890s were such an active time for Chinese cases (for obvious reasons) but I love it so much and I want to know EVERYTHING.

Here's a few documented by the National Archives: http://recordsofrights.org/search?tag=Chinese+Americans

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unfortunately now I need to figure out how to tell the Wong Kim Ark story in a small number of pages

(no subject)

Now that I've spent the day reading about it, I feel like the tragedy of Wong Kim Ark is that, even though he won birthright citizenship, the immigration laws at the time made it basically moot -- Wong Kim Ark was one of very few Chinese Americans to be born in America, and he himself went back to China to find a wife, since Chinese women were basically not allowed to immigrate. He had 3 sons over 5 trips to China, and only got to see them once every 5 years or so. The Supreme Court decision was very much about guaranteeing that Irish and German immigrants were able to retain birthright citizenship. So... yeah. I'm not saying it didn't have a lasting effect, but it had a very limited effect on Wong Kim Ark's own ability to have children born in the US.