2nd Edition

A New History of Asian America

By Shelley Sang-Hee Lee Copyright 2026
440 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

440 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

440 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The second edition of A New History of Asian America offers an expansive, updated synthesis of the Asian American experience, making it essential reading for those seeking a nuanced understanding of Asian America’s role in shaping contemporary society. Covering Asian American history from early Orientalist conceptions preceding the United States’ founding to the racial reckonings of the... Read more

Introduction  1. Orientalism Before Asian America  2. Asian Diasporas and an Emerging Nation  3. Working Lives and the World of Work  4. Communities, Ethnic Solidarity, and Social Intimacy in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries  5. Racism and Resistance: From Chinese Exclusion to Tydings-McDuffie  6. Modernity and New Generations Through the 1930s  7. War, Disruption and Realignment, 1941–1952  8. Cold War, Civil Rights, and Asian America Remade  9. Insurgency and Change: Asian American Activism in the 1960s and 1970s  10. Globalization, Neoliberalism, and a New Asian America  11. Recalibrations and Reckonings: Identity and Its Discontents in the Multicultural Era  12. Security, Securitization, and Borders After 9/11  13. Asian America From the Age of Obama to the Election of Trump  14. Crisis, Visibility, and the Struggle for Meaning: The 2020s  Epilogue: History Still Matters

Biography

Shelley Sang-Hee Lee is the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of American Studies, History, and Humanities at Brown University, USA. Her books include Koreatown, Los Angeles: Race, Immigration, and the American Dream (2022), and her current projects focus on bureaucracy and undocumented immigration in America during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the co-host of the podcast The Confluence: Ethnic Studies and the Public Good.

Praise for the previous edition

"Lee has written an eloquent and comprehensive book that will be the standard text in Asian American history for many years to come."
K. Scott Wong
, author of Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War

"Shelley Lee’s A New History of Asian America is an exciting, well-written, and much-needed new textbook. Synthesizing newer scholarship, this work includes chapters on previously understudied topics. It is ideal for teaching."
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, author of Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity

"From European Orientalism to model minority to racial profiling, A New History of Asian America provides readers a much-needed synthesis of Asian American history from the late eighteenth century to the closing decades of the twentieth century. Truly a book for the twenty-first century!"
Yen Le Espiritu, author of Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love

"Shelley Lee has woven together foundational texts and newer scholarship to produce a critically engaging and elegant narrative. A New History of Asian America deserves a wide readership and will be especially helpful for instructors and students in ethnic studies, American studies, and United States history."
David K. Yoo, author of Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945