Specifics: Key figures include the cooks, janitors, house servants and other immigrant populations who worked and occasionally attended Stanford, as well as their contemporaries who experienced contact with Chinese culture in their day-to-day lives by interactions with these immigrants.
Argument: I hope to write about the turn-of-the-century American experience of Chinese culture through Stanford-specific examples—how did people view the Chinese at the time, vice-versa, and how did they interact?
Significance: While my thesis pertains to Stanford's history, it's also a crucial time in the history of California in the aftermath of the Chinese influx and then exclusion during the late 1800s. Relatives of these first Chinese immigrants may still be alive, and in general I think this aspect of the University's early history has been forgotten.
Primary literature: Student letters, early faculty memoirs, pay-roll records, census records.
Secondary literature: Campus histories, Chinatown histories, Chinatown archives, Palo Alto and neighboring city archives.
Troubleshooting: Since this is a project I've already begun working on, I want to make sure that my work is fresh, as well as go back and look again at sources I've already found and find things I may have missed. I also need to be creative with new sources and research methods, I'm looking forward to finding more in Menlo Park and going to Chinatown in San Francisco.
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