The objectives of this dissertation are twofold. First, it documents the changing strategies of political participation among Korean immigrants in the US during the period between 1903 and 1945. Second, it traces the development of national and ethnic identities among Korean immigrants over the same time period. Through a detailed narrative of Korean immigrant involvement in the diasporic state-making efforts of the Korean independence movement, I seek to unite these two thematic threads. In doing so, I reveal the ways in which politics and political participation constituted sites for the construction of Korean-American ethnicity.