Nancy Rao Receives the Sally and Ken Owens Award from the Western History Association

Nancy Rao’s recent book, Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth-Century California and Beyond, has received the 2026 Sally and Ken Owens Award for the best book on the history of the Pacific West from the Western History Association.

The Owens Committee remarked, “Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s Inside Chinese Theater reconstructs a long-forgotten once-loved cultural phenomenon in the nineteenth-century Pacific West: Chinese opera theater. Rao combines her extensive knowledge of traditional Chinese opera with a creative use of American newspaper reports and lithographs to document this transpacific cultural form, trace its circulation between rural and urban spaces, and reveal the struggle to defend it against detractors. Rao has produced a truly original cultural history, which unearths a world of Chinese art, leisure, and celebration in the American West.”