Background

The staying power of this language also has to do with the significance of this period in the Pacific Northwest. Our time frame begins ten years before the United States Census Bureau declared the closure of the western frontier. What follows feels like an ideological rather than physical land grab.

A prominent theme throughout this research is the concept of "retaining" the American character in Washington and Oregon, when it was clearly churning with development. Settlers perpetually gauge other immigrant groups on their ability to assimilate or "Americanize," with particular focus on differentiating between "New Immigrants" and "Old Immigrants," though they may have only arrived within ten years of one another.

During this period in American history, racial animosity was frequently used to divide labor, leading immigrant groups to undercut one another to the industrialist's advantage. Racial provocations would also be used as a straw man for industrialists to argue against anti-monopoly legislation, shape narratives around land development and act opportunistically during times of war.

While you use this resource, it is helpful to consider:

· What adjectives are used to describe these groups and how do they change over time in relation to industrial interests?

· When do immigrant groups stop being referred to by their country of origin and become "American," "White" or hyphenates, such as Polish-American?

· How do world events shape these representations? Are there also industrial motives behind these narratives, as in the case of WWII opportunism on the part of agricultural interests seizing Japanese American farmland during incarceration?

Other naming decisions:

· I have chosen to refer to each group simply from their country of origin rather than hyphenate-American though many of the people addressed in this media may have been American citizens. This was a decision to make the material easier to read and less redundant.

· In future iterations of this project, I would like to rename all subject tags for Hindu materials to South Asian, as implemented in the South Asian Digital Archive. I decided on Hindu because it was the most popular and accurate identifier used by the media during this time. That said, this description does assume religious practice, which is not necessarily correct.

· Finally, of all the groups described in this project, the only communities that were not immigrants are Native Americans. That said, I felt that the representation of this community was a crucial element to this work, examining how the media often 'othered' these communities to engage in myth making around who a true American was and what they resembled.

This process involved retrieving the top 40 items of each group based on relevance, or the greatest number of matches for each search term. The searches all followed the same formula, "_____ labor," 1880-1930 date range, and Washington or Oregon state based publications. From these forty items, results were filtered down to 10 items based on their locality.

Items that were reprints of stories outside of Washington and Oregon were removed. Documents generally focused on events within this area, but editorials on some national topics could be included if they provided insight into Pacific Northwest culture. These ten items were then separated into five earlier and later halves, demonstrating linguistic change over time.

Words used in the search were then removed from results. For example, in "Japanese labor," "Japanese," "labor," "laborer" and any words referring to that community group would be removed from visualizations, including slurs. This was not done to sanitize the material, rather to focus on the underlying industrial and economic elements that may have been influencing this media.