IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/zbw/espost/337372.html

“Othering” Through War: Depiction of Asians/Asian Americans in U.S. History Textbooks

Author

Listed:
  • Choi, Minju
  • Lucy, Li
  • Bromley, Patricia
  • Bamman, David

Abstract

Using computational methods, we investigate a data set of 874,125 sentences from 30 U.S. history textbooks used in California and Texas schools to consider how they discuss Asians/Asian Americans. Only 1% of all sentences in our sample has any mention of Asians. Most of these sentences focus on Chinese and Japanese, and when individuals are named, they are usually White. The most prevalent topics in which Asians appear are about war. Discussions of wars are a centerpiece of history textbooks, but the dominance of such narratives is especially high for Asians relative to other ethno-cultural groups. The sentiment of verbs used to describe Asians is strikingly negative. Asians are described more negatively than others in both war and nonwar contexts.

Suggested Citation

  • Choi, Minju & Lucy, Li & Bromley, Patricia & Bamman, David, 2025. "“Othering” Through War: Depiction of Asians/Asian Americans in U.S. History Textbooks," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 54(6), pages 318-327.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:337372
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/337372/1/Full-text-article-Choi-et-al-Othering-through-war.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:337372. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zbwkide.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.