Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea

A different narrative of the founding of the national park system. For far too long, all the credit for the national parks has been vested with either mythic "rugged Western pioneers" or a "visionary" like John Muir or Theodore Roosevelt. It is time to revisit Olmsted's Yosemite Report and its enduring vision of popular government using its resources to improve people's lives as an important element to those who fought for a new birth of American freedom. Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr demonstrate how anti-slavery activism, war, and the remaking of the federal government gave rise to the American public park and concept of national parks. The authors closely examine Frederick Law Olmsted's 1865 Yosemite Report--the key document that expresses the aspirational vision of making great public parks keystone institutions of a renewed liberal democracy. Both Central Park in New York and Yosemite Valley in California became public parks during the tumultuous years before and during the Civil War" --