Legal dimensions of the Chinese experience in Los Angeles, 1860-1880

On October 24, 1871, a massacre of eighteen Chinese in Los Angeles brought the small southern California settlement into the national spotlight. Within a few days, news of this “night of horrors” was reported in newspapers across the country. This massacre has been cited in Asian American narratives as the first documented outbreak of ethnic violence against a Chinese community in the United States. This is ironic because Los Angeles’ small population has generally placed it on the periphery in historical studies of the California anti-Chinese movement. Because the massacre predated Los Angeles’ organized Chinese exclusion movements of the late 1870s, it has often been erroneously dismissed as an aberration in the history of the city.

The violence of 1871 was an outburst highlighting existing community tensions that would become part of public debate by decade’s close. The purpose of this study is to insert the massacre into a broader context of anti-Chinese sentiments, legal discrimination, and dehumanization in nineteenth century Los Angeles. While a second incident of widespread anti-Chinese violence never occurred, brutal attacks directed at Chinese small businessmen and others highlighted continued community conflict. Similarly, economic rivalries and concerns over Chinese prostitution that underlay the 1871 massacre were manifest in later campaigns of economic discrimination and vice suppression that sought to minimize Chinese influence within municipal limits. An analysis of the massacre in terms of anti-Chinese legal, social and economic strategies in nineteenth-century Los Angeles will elucidate these important continuities.

New Insights from Aperiodic Variability of Young Stars

Nearly all young stars are variable, with the variability traditionally divided into two classes: periodic variables and aperiodic or "irregular" variables. Periodic variables have been studied extensively, typically using periodograms, while aperiodic variables have received much less attention due to a lack of standard statistical tools. However, aperiodic variability can serve as a powerful probe of young star accretion physics and inner circumstellar disk structure. For my dissertation, I analyzed data from a large-scale, long-term survey of the nearby North America Nebula complex, using Palomar Transient Factory photometric time series collected on a nightly or every few night cadence over several years. This survey is the most thorough exploration of variability in a sample of thousands of young stars over time baselines of days to years, revealing a rich array of lightcurve shapes, amplitudes, and timescales.

I have constrained the timescale distribution of all young variables, periodic and aperiodic, on timescales from less than a day to ~100 days. I have shown that the distribution of timescales for aperiodic variables peaks at a few days, with relatively few (~15%) sources dominated by variability on tens of days or longer. My constraints on aperiodic timescale distributions are based on two new tools, magnitude- vs. time-difference (Δm-Δt) plots and peak-finding plots, for describing aperiodic lightcurves; this thesis provides simulations of their performance and presents recommendations on how to apply them to aperiodic signals in other time series data sets. In addition, I have measured the error introduced into colors or SEDs from combining photometry of variable sources taken at different epochs. These are the first quantitative results to be presented on the distributions in amplitude and time scale for young aperiodic variables, particularly those varying on timescales of weeks to months.