May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. The month-long celebration is a chance to acknowledge the historic achievements of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and to highlight their undeniable impact on American history.
From the Library of Congress:
May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month – a celebration of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. A rather broad term, Asian/Pacific encompasses all of the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island).
Like most commemorative months, Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month originated with Congress. In 1977 Reps. Frank Horton of New York introduced House Joint Resolution 540 to proclaim the first ten days in May as Pacific/Asian American Heritage Week. In the same year, Senator Daniel Inouye introduced a similar resolution, Senate Joint Resolution 72. Neither of these resolutions passed, so in June 1978, Rep. Horton introduced House Joint Resolution 1007. This resolution proposed that the President should “proclaim a week, which is to include the seventh and tenth of the month, during the first ten days in May of 1979 as ‘Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week.’” This joint resolution was passed by the House and then the Senate and was signed by President Jimmy Carter on October 5, 1978 to become Public Law 95-419 (PDF, 158kb). This law amended the original language of the bill and directed the President to issue a proclamation for the “7 day period beginning on May 4, 1979 as ‘Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week.’” During the next decade, presidents passed annual proclamations for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week until 1990 when Congress passed Public Law 101-283 (PDF, 166kb) which expanded the observance to a month for 1990. Then in 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102-450 (PDF, 285kb) which annually designated May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month.
The month of May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. The majority of the workers who laid the tracks were Chinese immigrants.
2024 - 2025 Artifacts
Musical Playlist Via YouTube. Please check this out!
Resources
Selected Audio and Video
American Archive of Public Broadcasting (Library of Congress & GBH)
The Library of Congress
Arts & Culture
Ann McClellen “The Cherry Blossom Festival: Sakura Celebration”
The Making of Asian America: A History (National Archives YouTube Channel)
Government, Politics, & Law
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2010: Leadership to Meet the Challenges of a Changing World
Lanxin Xiang -- The Ideological Context of U.S.-China Relations
Lanxin Xiang—The Ideological Context of U.S.-China Relations
Ying-Shih Yu—Despotism, Market and Confucianism in the Age of Wang Yang-Ming
Various Speakers—America Is in the Heart for the 21st Century: A Symposium on the Work of Filipino Author Carlos Bulosan: Part 1, Part 2
History
Journey to Freedom: The Boat People Retrospective
-- Morning Session
-- Luncheon Session
-- Afternoon SessionUnsung Heroes: A Symposium on the Heroism of Asian Pacific Americans During World War II
-- Part 1
-- Part 2Music & Performing Arts
National Archives
BARRIERS AND PASSES: Japanese Americans in Relocation Centers
Oh, the Stories They Tell: Chinese Exclusion Acts Case Files at the National Archives (2017 May 10)
National Endowment for the Humanities
National Gallery of Art
National Park Service
Smithsonian Institution
The Art of Movement and Coalition Building—Learning from Yuri Kochiyama
Beckoning: A Playlist of AAPI Joy, Sorrow, Rage and Resistance
Five Minutes of Political Theater: An Interview with Spoken Word Poet Regie Cabico
FORKLIFE: Korean Fried Chicken, a Transnational Comfort Food
“If We Don’t Have a Voice for Our Community, Who Is Going To?”
Language of a Nation: How Hawaii Became Part of the U.S., Parts 1-4
Legend and Legacy: Hawaiian Slack-Key Guitar with Ledward Kaapana
Making 120,000 Stories: Nobuko Miyamoto, Quetzal Flores, and Derek Nakamoto
Native Hawaiian Women Who Rallied for Suffrage
-- English
-- EspañolNew Songs for Ourselves: A Conversation with Sunny Jain, Nobuko Miyamoto, and Julian Saporiti
Sunny Jain's Wild Wild East at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Oral history: United States. Army. Field Artillery Battalion, 522nd.
Oral history: United States. Army. Regimental Combat Team, 442nd.
Some of the supporting literature for our Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month celebration: