First phase fire recovery efforts for the Museum of Chinese in the Americas archive

FAIN: PG-266590-19

Museum of Chinese in America (New York, NY 10013-3601)
Yue Ma (Project Director: January 2019 to October 2022)

The purchase of preservation supplies to rehouse the museum’s newspaper collection, consisting of 8,000 issues dating from 1952 to 2008 that feature news stories on the local politics and community life of Chinese Americans in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Fort Lauderdale, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.  As recommended by a previous assessment, rehousing the newspapers within flat archival boxes would protect them for use by current and future researchers.  The collection has drawn attention from historians of the Chinese diaspora in the United States and is an important resource of information on socio-economic and political topics, as well as on historical figures not covered by mainstream media outlets at the time.

The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) respectfully requests a grant of $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to rehouse our newspaper collection of over 8,000 individual issues from 33 different publishers located across North America. The publication dates range from 1952 through 2008 with about 40% of the collection written in English and the other 60% written in Chinese. This project will enable us to rehouse, restore, and preserve these newspapers for years of research and scholarship on Chinese American communities to come.