Forthcoming in October 2024
Expansive and groundbreaking, Nature Unfurled examines the links between Asian American and environmental history from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. With provocative essays on topics such as health in urban Chinatowns, Japanese oysters on Washington tidelands, American Indian and Japanese American experiences at the Leupp boarding school and isolation center, Southeast Asian community gardens, and contemporary Asian American outdoor recreation, this collection underscores the vibrancy of the field of Asian American environmental history.
Winner of the 2018 Theodore Saloutus Memorial Award from the Agricultural History Society for the best book on agricultural history in the United States
The mass confinement of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in United States history. This episode has generated considerable attention from scholars and journalists, but the role of the natural world has largely been overlooked. How did the bleak, arid camp environments shape the experiences of and interactions between Japanese Americans and government officials? Nature Behind Barbed Wire addresses this question, placing the natural world squarely at the center of the narrative. It illustrates how the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story, shaped by the lands and waters of the Pacific Coast and the inland camps.
Fisheries and tourism have been central to the Monterey, California economy for over a century. Starting in the late nineteenth century, tourists and fishermen descended on this coastal community, attracted by beautiful scenery and fecund waters, respectively. During the first half of the twentieth century, the sardine industry boomed, and Cannery Row--made famous by John Steinbeck's 1945 novel--was humming with activity. Today, the once-abundant sardine fishery has largely disappeared, and tourists revel in a post-industrial Cannery Row and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Shaping the Shoreline traces the interplay between these industries and the diverse residents who sustained them.