Explores Asian Americans' diverse connections and interactions with the natural world As immigrants and laborers, gardeners and artists, activists and vacationers, Asian Americans have played, worked, and worshipped in nature for almost two centuries, forging enduring relationships with diverse places and people. In the process, their actual or perceived ties to the environment have added to and amplified xenophobia and racist tropes. Indeed, white constructions of Asian Americans as the yellow peril, the perpetual foreigner, and the model minority were often intertwined with their environmental activities. At the same time, Asian Americans also harnessed environmental resources for their own needs, challenging restrictions and outmaneuvering their detractors in the process. 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. "This book asks (and answers) how Asian American studies might change if we thought more rigorously about the influence of the environment on our material and social lives. I found myself either learning something new or getting a new perspective with almost every chapter, and by the end of the book I was convinced of the vibrancy of the field and the necessity of Asian American environmental history"―LeiLani Nishime, coeditor of Racial Ecologies " Nature Unfurled is a stunning contribution to the fields of Asian American and environmental history. Connie Chiang has assembled an essential volume that adds new topics and communities while simultaneously revisiting subjects like Anti-Asian immigrant legislation and Japanese-American internment with wholly original arguments and archives. This collection is an instant masterpiece that will change how scholars and activists understand their collective and intersecting pasts with an eye to more sustainable futures."―Julie Sze, author of Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger "In this path-breaking volume, a collection of talented scholars demonstrate the important insights to be gained through the long-overdue fusion of environmental history and Asian American history, enriching both fields in the process. From lantern flies to outdoor recreation to boarding schools, the world appears in a fresh new light after reading Nature Unfurled ."―Karl Jacoby, Columbia University "[T]his anthology places Asian immigrants and Asian Americans as an integral part of the natural, physical world."― International Examiner Explores Asian Americans' diverse connections and interactions with the natural world Connie Y. Chiang is a professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College. She is author of Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast and Nature behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration . Contributors: Katharine Achacoso, Connie Y. Chiang, Yesenia Navarrete Hunter, Hana Maruyama, Christine Peralta, JoAnna Poblete, Michael Menor Salgarolo, Tamara Venit Shelton, Ashanti Shih, Jeannie N. Shinozuka, Cecilia M. Tsu, Davina Two Bears, Sarah D. Wald, and Kathleen Whalen