January 30, 2017

“Yellow Peril” Exhibit Explores 150 Years of Sino-American Relations

“When the ‘Yellow Peril’ Became Just Like Us,” on exhibit at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library, explores the complexities of the United States’ perception of China through images, artifacts, and documents from 1800 through the 1950s. Curated by Susan Glosser, Associate Professor of History and Program Director of Asian Studies, the special collection runs through February.

“When the ‘Yellow Peril’ Became Just Like Us,” on exhibit at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library, explores the complexities of the United States’ perception of China through images, artifacts, and documents from 1800 through the 1950s. Curated by Susan Glosser, Associate Professor of History and Program Director of Asian Studies, the special collection runs through February.

Through a variety of primary sources such as images, artifacts, and documents, the exhibit examines how Americans both rejected - and later embraced - notions of China from the 1800s to the 1950s. Developed and curated by Susan Glosser, the exhibit runs through February.

Glosser, who earned her PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, focuses her research on issues of gender, urban culture, and political culture in modern (19th and 20th Century) China. Glosser has lived and studied in Taipei and Shanghai. Glosser sees the exhibit as offering a rare opportunity for people to learn not only from Special Collections’ historical documents, but also from various personal papers and other literary material that Glosser and her team of students researched and developed.

The exhibit, like so much at Lewis & Clark, is the result of faculty-student collaboration. Recent history grads Kevin Dadik BA ’14, and Sten Eccles-Irwin BA ’16, along with current students Drew Matlovsky ’18 and Heather Schadt ’17 contributed to the exhibition.

This story was written by Elise Wilde ’18. 

History

Collaborative Research at Lewis & Clark