Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2020 i Cobblestone American History and Current Events for Kids and Children

In the mid-1800s, corruption, natural disasters, oppressive taxes, and food shortages led to an exodus of people from Guangdong Province in southeast China. Many Chinese went to Southeast Asia. Others decided to journey to America, where gold had been discovered in California in 1848. By 1852, as many as 25,000 Chinese laborers had arrived on the West Coast to try their luck in the goldfields. The travelers were mostly men who hoped to make their fortunes and return to their families in China. At first, the strangers from China were welcomed. As the gold supply began to shrink, however, the competition for new land claims grew violent. Most of the Chinese began to work claims that white miners had abandoned. With patience and determination, they sometimes found gold that the…

The first naturalized Filipino American was Ramon Reyes Lala (RIGHT). The son of a wealthy Filipino family, he was educated in Europe. During his studies abroad, he met people who were not familiar with his native country. He decided to write about it. While working on his book in the Philippines in the late 1800s, he supported his country’s struggle for independence from Spain. Threatened with arrest, he eventually fled to New York. He remained in the United States, where he published his book. The Philippine Islands is the first book on that country to be published in English. More recently, in 2018, Erin Entrada Kelly became the first Filipino American to win the Newbery Medal for her 2017 children’s novel Hello, Universe. Partly inspired by Filipino folklore, the book…

Meet some remarkable Asian Americans who found their way and left their mark as new citizens in the United States. Making a Splash Victoria Manalo Draves was a champion diver and the first Asian American woman to win two gold medals in the Olympics. But she didn’t learn how to swim until she was 10 years old. Her parents couldn’t afford swimming lessons. Her Filipino father worked as a chef and her English mother was employed as a maid. With three other siblings in the family, they didn’t have any money to spare. But Draves loved swimming and found a way to keep herself afloat. In 1940, 16-year-old Victoria began diving. A few years later, she met Lyle Draves. He became her coach and later her husband. Her hard work…

During World War II, 120,0 00 people of Japanese ancestr y were interned in the U nited States. One of them, Toyo Miyatake, smuggled in a lens and built his own camera against the rules of the internme nt camp. Before the war, Miyatake had been a successful photographer in Los Angeles. His photographs won multiple awards. Originally, photography was going to be his secondary career to support his other passion—oil painting. He got so good at photography that he became the photographer for many book s and the subject of two documentaries. He wa s so talented that people like the American photographer Edward Weston respected his opinion . Miyatake is credited with making Weston’s first gallery exhibition possible. He had a ver y good life before he was…

We’re looking for a funny caption for this photo. Send your idea, name, and address to: Just for Fun, COBBLESTONE, Cricket Media, 70 East Lake Street, Suite 800, Chicago, IL 60601, or email it to cobblestone@cricketmedia.com. Include a note from a parent or legal guardian clearly stating: “This is my child’s original work, and COBBLESTONE has permission to publish it with my child’s name, age, and hometown, in print and online.” If your caption is chosen, we’ll mail you a copy of the issue in which it appears.…

In 1942, 29-year-old artist Miné Okubo was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II (1939–1945). Art was the driving force of Okubo’s life: Before the war, she had traveled through Europe as a graduate student on an art scholarship from the University of California at Berkeley. Okubo chronicled her experiences in the camp in more than 2,000 drawings. After the war, she published about 200 of her “documentary sketches” along with short accompanying text. The title of the graphic memoir was Citizen 13660. “13660” was the internment number assigned to her family unit. Okubo captured the difficulties suffered by the internees in a straightforward, unsentimental way. Her sketches reveal people enduring hardship with stoicism. The internees have serious faces, but Okubo included humor. For…

Ever wonder where the term “Indian” originated? It comes from the Indus River in present-day India. In the fifth century b.c.e., the ancient Greeks referred to people of that region as “Indians.” They used the word Indoi. Indigenous people in North America initially were referred to as “Indians” because Christopher Columbus believed he had reached India when he landed in the Americas. The string of islands that separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean Sea are referred to as the West Indies for similar reasons. Today, the terms “Indian American” or “Asian Indian” are commonly used to distinguish South Asia immigrants from Native Americans…

Refugees are people who have been forced to flee their homes to escape serious danger. Here are three refugee situations happening in the world right now. FLEEING WAR During war, civilians’ lives often are at risk. Villages and cities become unsafe as soldiers battle in the streets, forcing people to leave their homes. An extreme example of this is in Syria, where a civil war has been raging since 2011. The country has the world’s largest refugee population. Nearly 12 million people have been displaced by the fighting. Almost half of those people have been forced to flee the country altogether. Syrians have made their way to other Middle Eastern countries and Europe. A large number of the refugees now reside in temporary camps and struggle with poverty. A Long…

Mark your calendars: October 28 is National Immigrants Day. As far as holidays go, National Immigrants Day is a relatively new one. It was first celebrated in 1987. But today, more and more people live in a country in which they were not born. That makes the world full of immigrants—and full of people with something to celebrate. National Today, a website that researches and tracks “holidays”— from National Disability Day (December 3) to National Pizza Day (February 9)—has ideas for how to mark National Immigration Day. Do a little research into your own immigrant history. Plan a party and ask all your friends to bring an international dish. Or read a book that will introduce you to an immigrant’s experience.…

The first waves of Asian immigrants to the United States came from China, Japan, and Korea. They traveled by boat across the Pacific Ocean and landed in California. In 1910, authorities opened an immigration station to handle the number of immigrants hoping to enter the country on the West Coast. The station was built on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. But unlike the Ellis Island Immigration Station on the East Coast designed to process immigrants, Angel Island was designed to detain immigrants. The station was in use until 1940. After years of neglect, plans were made to demolish the buildings in 1970. But then a park ranger discovered Chinese poems carved into the abandoned structures’ walls. The Colonel and I learned that the poems were written by detainees. The…

Indian peafowl are native to and are found in the wild throughout South Asia. Yet, they have been able to adapt to life in many other countries, including parts of wintry Canada. The large birds spend most of their time on forested ground, but they can fly and will roost in trees. They eat grains as well as small rodents and reptiles. As India’s national bird, peafowl are protected by law in that country. Female peafowl are called “peahens.” Male peafowl are called “peacocks.” The beautiful iridescent blue Indian peacock has a long train of stiff tail feathers that it will fan out to display—mostly to attract a mate. The eyespots on the tail feathers are called “ocelli.” Peahens are mostly shades of brown.…

What does it mean to belong to a country? Do you belong to the country from which your parents came, or do you belong to the country in which you were born? The U.S. Supreme Court addressed these questions in the United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Wong Kim Ark was born in the early 1870s in San Francisco, California. Wong’s parents were Chinese. They later returned to China. Wong went to visit them in 1890 and then returned to California without any problem. Believing he was free to enter and exit the country whenever he wished, Wong visited China again in 1894 and returned in August 1895. That time, he was denied reentry into the United States. John Wise, the collector of customs at the port in San Francisco,…

The Hmong (pronounced hmoNG) are an ethnic people who originally lived in Southeast Asia. Their identity has been molded by persecution and migration. Historically, the Hmong were an ethnic minority in China, where they are known as the Miao. By the 19th century, their way of life was threatened by the dominant Han population. Many Hmong people fled across the Chinese border to present-day Thailand, Southeast Myanmar (Burma), and Laos. The Hmong chiefly settled in remote mountainous regions. They eked out a living by farming, raising animals, and hunting. Their communities consisted of extended but small spread out clans. They did not have schools. Children helped their parents in the fields or cared for siblings. Girls learned needlework to help sew the family’s clothing. Despite being marginalized and scattered over…

This month’s mystery hero lived an amazing life! He died at the age of 102 in 2019. But his work lives on and can be found all around the world. Born in China in 1917, our hero lived a privileged life as a child in Hong Kong. His family’s wealth came from selling herbs used in Chinese medicine. They became members of the “scholar-gentry,” a class of people who believed that knowledge of literature and the arts was important. When our hero was 10 years old, his family moved to the city of Shanghai. Our hero attended a private school with a demanding academic program. Students were permitted only a half day of fun a month! In the little spare time our hero had, he enjoyed watching American movies. Those…