Christopher Reed is currently researching Sino-American relations during the 1920s. His dissertation will explore American attitudes, official and popular, toward China. He is one of four History graduate students recently awarded an ISU Graduate Research Fellowship to spend a semester conducting research and writing. Chris has visited the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, where the papers of numerous government officials and departments are helping him explain the contradictory opinion Americans had of China. On one hand the “Yellow Peril” sentiment was still in full force during this era, yet on the other hand many Americans saw China as the El Dorado of the Orient – a vast market of great potential for American agricultural and industrial excesses. The rich cache of documents he uncovered during his research demonstrates that American diplomacy with China was driven by a fervent anti-communism that far preceded the Cold War, allied with a good old-fashioned paternalism toward a "backward" and war-torn people.