Episode Thirty-Nine: Ranchos, Chinese Americans, Genocide, and Uncle Tom

​Next Rule of History: Don't detach from your humanity. Anecdotal value refers to the primary social and political significance of stories or anecdotal evidence in advancing knowledge of a social, cultural, or economic phenomenon. While anecdotal evidence is generally unscientific, the evaluation of anecdotes has welcomed sustained academic scrutiny from economists and intellectuals in the last several decades. Academics seek to quantify the importance of the use of anecdotes. For example, consider the quote widely misattributed to Joseph Stalin: The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.

Here is a reasonably morbid exercise I have my students perform to help unshackle themselves from just reading the statistics of an event:

Imagine one dead body. Imagine the toe tag, the white sheet over the corpse. Feel the stillness in the air. This is relatively easy to do, even to someone with the weakest of imaginations.

Now imagine two bodies. Not too difficult here, side by side in the morgue.

Now 10. Ten bodies start to change to the room's smell, which is now full of bodies stacked on top like a ghastly pyramid. 

Now 100. Decaying bodies spill out of the room. Flies and stench of rot fill the air.

Now 1000. 

Now 10,000.

Eventually, the number because to arduous to control. The vision and scope are lost in the sheer size of a problem. That is how we can sit like Hindu cows when we read an estimated 100,000 civilians died from the US bombing of Tokyo in 1945. People are not numbers, and we must remember that as we go through our textbooks. These anecdotal events are actual events that happen to actual people.

HIGHLIGHTS

• The Spanish and Mexican governments made many concessions and land grants (Ranchos) from 1785 to 1846. Spanish Government made the Concessions of land to retired soldiers to induce them to remain on the frontier. 
• In the 19th century, Chinese–US maritime trade began the history of Chinese Americans. From the outset, European Americans met them with the distrust and overt racism of settled European populations, ranging from massacres to pressuring Chinese migrants into what became known as Chinatowns. 
• Between 1846 and 1873, it is conservatively estimated that American settlers murdered some 9,500 California Natives, and acts of enslavement, kidnapping, rape, child separation, and displacement were widespread. State authorities and militias encouraged, tolerated, and carried out these acts.
  
• Uncle Tom's Cabin is an antislavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two volumes in 1852, the book had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the US and is said to have helped lay the groundwork for the American Civil War.

CHAPTERS
0:37 Intro
3:06 Ranchos
12:54 Chinese Americans
23:33 California Genocide
29:07 Uncle Tom's Cabin
36:56 Outro

RESOURCES
Ranchos of California
Ranchos of California
History of Chinese Americans
California genocide explained
California genocide
uncle tom's cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin