Educating the Next Generation

California’s public schools didn’t teach Asian American history to a young Dr. Beth Lew-Williams. Neither did college.

So, for those powerful stories she heard as a child from her first-generation immigrant grandfather — who entered the U.S. in the 1930s, amid federal Chinese exclusion efforts and prejudice — she couldn’t fully grasp them.

“The stories I got within my family didn’t fit in the U.S. history classes that I was taking,” Lew-Williams says. “When I started to develop a further interest in history, I continued to not find the histories that I wanted, the histories that would’ve helped me to understand my own family.”

Dr. Beth Lew-WilliamsThis gave rise to a lifelong interest, which in turn resulted in an academic career that focuses on matters of race, migration, and Asian American history. Holding several degrees in history, including a Ph.D. from Stanford University, she now teaches the kind of information that she always wanted to learn.

Over the past decade, Lew-Williams has worked her way up the ranks of Princeton University’s history department. She is currently a tenured professor of history and the director of Asian American studies there.

Lew-Williams’s specialization and scholarly work are on 19th century history, she says, particularly about Chinese immigration to the U.S. West coast in the late 1800s. She’s the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

“I wrote it because I was interested originally in a period of anti-Chinese violence that occurred in the mid-1880s,” Lew-Williams tells Diverse. “There was this moment in 1885-86, when dozens – eventually I found more than 165 communities in the West Coast – attempted to expel Chinese residents from their towns and cities. I started that project trying to understand this phenomenon, which appeared to be contagious anti-Chinese violence in this period.”