Stanford graduate Pardee Lowe is said to be the first Chinese American author. His parents were active members of the Chinese community in San Francisco and Oakland, and Lowe continued to be extremely active in social, professional, alumni, and fraternal organizations and associations. Lowe's personal papers can be found in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives on campus.

This book has a dual purpose. The first is to present a biography of Yamato Ichihashi, a Stanford University professor who was one of the first academics of Asian ancestry in the United States. The second purpose is to present, through Ichihashi's wartime writings, the only comprehensive first-person account of internment life by one of the 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who, in 1942, were sent by the U.S. government to "relocation centers," the euphemism for prison camps.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869 is usually told as a story of national triumph and a key moment for American Manifest Destiny. The Railroad made it possible to cross the country in a matter of days instead of months, paved the way for new settlers to come out west, and helped speed America's entry onto the world stage as a modern nation that spanned a full continent. It also created vast wealth for its four owners, including the fortune with which Leland Stanford would found Stanford University some two decades later. But while the Transcontinental has often been celebrated in national memory, little attention has been paid to the Chinese workers who made up 90 percent of the workforce on the Western portion of the line. The Railroad could not have been built without Chinese labor, but the lives of Chinese railroad workers themselves have been little understood and largely invisible. Edited by Stanford professor Gordon Chang, and includes his essay "The Chinese and the Stanfords."

The final culmination of an 1987 University Committee on Minority Issues (UCMI) report established by the Stanford President and Provost in response to the a demand in minority awareness. The committee explores the concerns of the Rainbow Agenda, a list of demands from minority students, faculty, and staff at Stanford University, including the hiring of more minority faculty and staff, and more support for minority students.

No-No Boy, John Okada's only published novel, centers on a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the country that incarcerated him and his people in World War II and, upon release from federal prison after the war, is cast out by his divided community. In 1957, the novel faced a similar rejection until it was rediscovered and reissued in 1976 to become a celebrated classic of American literature. As a result of Okada's untimely death at age forty-seven, the author's life and other works have remained obscure. Okada is known to be one of the first Asian American novelists, and is the namesake of the Okada House, the Asian American theme house at Stanford University.