Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans,” she tells the story of the “thousands of Chinese people who were violently herded onto railroad cars, steamers or logging rafts, marched out of town or killed,” from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains

Chinese immigrants filed more than 7,000 lawsuits in the decade after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, “and they won the vast majority of them

some white Westerners championed the Chinese in their assertion of rights

Whites saw in Chinese workers precisely what they hated about their own lives: hard and underpaid work, long hours, poor living conditions and a dearth of women

white workers made the Chinese their scapegoats because of the similarities, rather than the differences, between them

The Chinese brought these suits as part of a strategy of forcing a nation to obey its own laws