Raising the Redwood Curtain: Labor Landscapes and Community Violence in a Pacific Littoral (Studies in Pacific Worlds)

Raising the Redwood Curtain explores how shifting land use practices and exploitative labor patterns spurred by the colonial settlement of the Pacific world influenced the genocide of California’s Native people, anti-Asian campaigns, and the oppression of eastern European immigrant workers.By carefully examining these local developments, it explores how global capitalism fundamentally reordered labor patterns and social relations. By analyzing the history of three episodes of labor and racial violence in Humboldt County, California, Michael T.Karp spans nearly a century in a detailed examination of the causes and interconnections between the Indian Island massacre of 1860, the expulsion of Chinese and Japanese people from the county between 1885 and 1906, and the killing and persecution of eastern Europeans during the Great Lumber Strike of 1935. Regional labor and land use patterns shaped these events, but so did global economic developments and environmental change, connecting dispar