| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land. By Peter Coates. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. x, 256 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-520-24930-1.)
As an amateur gardener and orchardist, I was extirpating invasive thistles and grasses in the riparian corridor abutting our twenty-acre orange grove in southern California, musing about why I was so intent on this laborious, and most probably, interminable task. Looking at the landscape around—oak chaparral—what actually belonged there and what did not? And where did those categories come from?	1
It was with those questions that I approached Peter Coates's latest book. His previous book, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (1998), provides a clear view of the complex evolution of ideas and attitudes toward nature. American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species sets out to use fauna and flora as a lens through which to understand the historical dialectic between Americans' understandings of the natural world and evolving notions of nationality, race, and immigration. The United States has been relatively sheltered from anthropogenic introductions until the great migrations of Europeans. Coates does not discuss the very early introductions of the first Spaniards (including the horse), or those of the Pilgrims, but concentrates on introductions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they correspond to a particularly xenophobic period in the country's history.	. . .

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