Abstract
This thesis explores the roots of anti-Asian sentiments and violence in the United States by re-examining the 1854 California Supreme Court case, People v. Hall. While previous scholarship on People v. Hall has examined this case in terms of immigration and discrimination, I look at Hall instead from a perspective of national belonging and citizenship. By analyzing the original District Court trial, a variety of newspapers, legal documents, and popular media from the nineteenth century, this thesis traces Hall’s lasting legacies and resonance in US society and culture. I argue that ideas about Asian people as inferior outsiders, liars, and tricksters were codified into US law and culture via the People v. Hall ruling. Such sentiments, which were disseminated across the United States, shaped US media representations of Chinese Americans and were then used to prompt Asian exclusion in the following decades. Though People v. Hall was struck down following the Civil War, it continued to have reverberations around the West Coast and across the nation, and its impact on characterizing Asian people as perpetual foreigners and as untrustworthy is still present to this day.