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Ghosts Of Gold Mountain

Historian Gordon Chang joins us to tell the story of Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad. Some 20,000 of them laid hundreds of miles of track, yet they've been left out of the history.

RadioWest divider.

Stanford historian Gordon Chang says most Americans know that Chinese laborers worked on the transcontinental railroad, but that’s all they know. Historians themselves haven’t been able to tell us much about the nearly 20,000 Chinese who built the Central Pacific line. So, Chang and his team have scoured the archives to reconstruct the lives, work, and legacy of Chinese railroad workers. He’s coming to Utah, and joins us to tell the story of one of the first big migrant labor forces in America.

Gordon Chang is a professor of American History at Stanford University. He's also Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education there. His book is called Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. [Indie bookstores|Amazon|Audible]

Wednesday, May 8 at 7 p.m., Chang is giving the free lecture "Working on the Railroad: Chinese Workers and America's First Transcontinental Line"at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on the campus of the University of Utah. It's presented in conjunction with the UMFA photography exhibit The Race to Promonotry: The Transcontinental Railroad and the American West.

On Thursday, May 9 at 7:30 p.m., he'll also give a reading at The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City.

Doug Fabrizio has been reporting for KUER News since 1987, and became News Director in 1993. In 2001, he became host and executive producer of KUER's RadioWest, a one hour conversation/call-in show on KUER 90.1 in Salt Lake City. He has gained a reputation for his thoughtful style. He has interviewed everyone from Isabel Allende to the Dalai Lama, and from Madeleine Albright to Desmond Tutu. His interview skills landed him a spot as a guest host of the national NPR program, "Talk of the Nation." He has won numerous awards for his reporting and for his work with RadioWest and KUED's Utah NOW from such organizations as the Society of Professional Journalists, the Utah Broadcasters Association, the Public Radio News Directors Association and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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