This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Chinese Railroad Workers
Between 1865 and 1869, thousands of Chinese migrants toiled at a grueling pace and in perilous working conditions to help construct America’s First Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project seeks to give a voice to the Chinese migrants whose labor on the Transcontinental Railroad helped to shape the physical and social landscape of the American West. The Project coordinates research in the United States and Asia in order to create an on-line digital archive available to all. The Project is also organizing major conferences and public events at Stanford and in China in 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the arrival of large numbers of Chinese to work on the railroad.
In collaboration with the Spatial History Project, we are producing visualizations and maps that help us understand how Chinese railroad workers contributed to shaping not just the physical but the social landscape of the West.
Former Research Assistants:
Jenny Barin, Griffin Bovee, Brianna Brown, Michael Carter, Juliana Chang, Mark Flores, Maria Greer, Hye Jeong Yoon, Ian Miller, Debra Pacio, Rachel Roberts, Sarah Sadlier, Christina Smith, Niuniu Teo, Nathan Weiser, Lowry Yankwich
![Spatial History](../media/images/bottom_corner.png)