AMH23Blog

      For module 5's Immigration essay, I chose to focus on The Life Story of a Chinese Businessman by Lee Chew (1906). This essay discusses the experiences one Chinese Immigrant has in leaving his home in China to build his own fortune in America. Some key ideas that can be found throughout the essay are firstly that there is strong nationalism amongst cultures and their own. To explain, immigrants such as the Chinese, Irish, and Italians tend to mostly stick to themselves and their own cultures as opposed to assimilating into others because of either their own beliefs, prejudices, or discrimination. For example, the narrator, who is a Chinese immigrant, mentions staying within "the Chinese theater and Chinatown" on his days off as opposed to mingling with Americans or other immigrants that aren't Chinese.  Even more, the narrator continuously insults other immigrants that aren't of his ethnicity by insulting their appearance, intelligence, and overall character

        This week in class we are discussing WW2 and the cause of the war, as well as, the atrocities that came from it. For this specific post, I will be honing in on the xenophobia and racism that happened during the war and how those in power abused their authority to discriminate specific groups of people. Notably, examples of this abuse in power would be the creation of Jewish concentration camps by Germany and Japanese internment camps by the US. In both cases, the government of these nations wielded their powers to hurt the citizens of their nation because of their xenophobia towards those they saw as scapegoats and blamed for the war.       To explain further, Germany created concentration camps mainly for Jews, but also those they saw as "lesser than", in an attempt to create an ultimate Aryan race as directed by Hitler, who had the power at the time. Many historians speculate that Hitler mainly targeted Jews because of his belief that almost all of the issues German