The Bellingham riots of 1907 made national news: Hundreds of white workers viciously attacked east Indian men, mostly Sikhs.

"They dragged them out of their beds, and threw their belongings in the streets, and beat them, and warned them to leave Bellingham at once," explains historian Seema Sohi.

For Sohi, this history is personal. She herself is Sikh, and she got her doctorate at the University of Washington, where she researched and wrote about the Bellingham riot. Her book about it is "Echoes of Mutiny."

Sikhs migrated to the Pacific Northwest and the Bellingham area in search of lumber mill work in the early 1900s. In 1907, white workers in Bellingham blamed Sikhs for taking lumber mill jobs that they saw as "theirs," Sohi explains, and "ultimately the mob was successful in ridding Bellingham of almost every South Asian worker."

But the Bellingham riot was explicitly about race. In the rhetoric of the era, "'a tide of turbans," as they called it, was going to invade the Pacific Coast states, Sohi says, "and it was the job of the working man to protect the racial composition of the nation."