What We Are Reading Today: Ghosts of Gold Mountain

In this groundbreaking account, award-winning scholar Gordon H. Chang draws on unprecedented research to recover the Chinese railroad workers’ stories and celebrate their role in remaking America.
Chang, professor of humanities and history at Stanford University, has written a fascinating account of the labor and technology involved in building the Transcontinental Railroad.
Hired at sub-market wages, which were still more than they might have imagined earning at home, thousands of Chinese men risked their lives to make the railroad a reality.
Ghosts of Gold Mountain “is nothing less than a fantastic feat of scholarship that not merely shines a spotlight onto a group that have nearly vanished from America’s historical memory, but makes them all come alive again,” said a review published in goodreads.com.
A lack of primary sources detailing the lives of the men who built one half of the transcontinental railroad — not a single diary and only a few letters — means Chang is forced to rely on payroll documents, inventory lists, folk songs, and other such sources to piece together his story.