December 8, 2023
Hidetaka Hirota, AARC faculty affiliate, discusses the history of immigrants and the U.S. transcontinental railroad in this Berkeley Talks podcast. The discussion acknowledges that although a lot is known about how the transcontinental railroad was constructed and its role in Westward expansion, very little is known about the everyday lives of the laborers who made the railroad possible. By describing the hostile anti-immigrant sentiment of the time period and the role of immigrants in U.S. westward expansion, Hirota addresses this historical oversight.