an intelligent and level-headed look at the great promise and the great problems associated with the Park Service's Mission 66 program. (Ken Burns, filmmaker)Winner Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians Winner J. B. Jackson Book Prize, Foundation for Landscape StudiesIn the years following World War II, Americans visited the national parks in unprecedented numbers, yet Congress held funding at prewar levels and park conditions steadily declined. Elimination of the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal programs further reduced the ability of the federal government to keep pace with the wear and tear on park facilities.To address the problem, in 1956 a ten-year, billion-dollar initiative titled "Mission 66" was launched, timed to be completed in 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the National Park Service. The program covered more than one hundred visitor centers (a building type invented by Mission 66 planners), expanded campgrounds, innumerable comfort stations and other public facilities, new and wider roads, parking lots, maintenance buildings, and hundreds of employee residences. During this transformation, the park system also acquired new seashores, recreation areas, and historical parks, agency uniforms were modernized, and the arrowhead logo became a ubiquitous symbol. To a significant degree, the national park system and the National Park Service as we know them today are products of the Mission 66 era.Mission 66 was controversial at the time, and it continues to incite debate over the policies it represented. Hastening the advent of the modern environmental movement, it transformed the Sierra Club from a regional mountaineering club into a national advocacy organization. But Mission 66 was also the last systemwide, planned development campaign to accommodate increased numbers of automotive tourists. Whatever our judgment of Mission 66, we still use the roads, visitor centers, and other facilities the program built.Ethan Carr's book examines the significance of the Mission 66 program and explores the influence of midcentury modernism on landscape design and park planning. Environmental and park historians, architectural and landscape historians, and all who care about our national parks will enjoy this copiously illustrated history of a critical period in the development of the national park system.

How the work and writings of Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of American landscape architecture, inspired the creation of parks to benefit the public. During the turbulent decade the United States engaged in a civil war, abolished slavery, and remade the government, the public park emerged as a product of these dramatic changes. New York's Central Park and Yosemite in California both embodied the "new birth of freedom" that had inspired the Union during its greatest crisis, epitomizing the duty of republican government to enhance the lives and well-being of all its citizens. A central thread connecting the apparently disparate phenomena of abolition, the Civil War, and the dawn of urban and national parks is the life of Frederick Law Olmsted. Before collaborating on the design of Central Park, Olmsted had traveled as a journalist through the Southern states and published firsthand accounts of the inhumane conditions he found there, arguing that slavery had become an insurmountable obstacle to national progress. In 1864, he was asked to prepare a plan for a park in Yosemite Valley, created by Congress to redefine and expand the privileges of American citizenship associated with Union victory. His groundbreaking Yosemite Report effectively created an intellectual framework for a national park system. Here Olmsted expressed the core tenet of the national park idea and park making generally: that the republic should provide its citizenry access to the restorative benefits of nature. His vision was realized with the passage in 1916 of legislation that created the National Park Service, drafted in large measure by Olmsted Jr. and based on the ideas and aspirations fully expressed fifty years earlier in his father's report.The National Park Service has been slow to embrace the senior Olmsted's role in this history. In the early twentieth century, a period of "reconciliation" between North and South, National Park Service administrators preferred more anodyne narratives of pristine Western landscapes discovered by rugged explorers and spontaneously reimagined as national parks. They wanted a history disassociated from urban parks and the problems of industrializing cities and unburdened by the legacies of slavery and Native American dispossession.Marking the bicentennial of Olmsted's birth, the forthcoming book sets the historical record straight as it offers a new interpretation of how the American park--urban and national--came to figure so prominently in our cultural identity, and why this more complex and inclusive story deserves to be told.

Tracing the history of landscape park design from British gardens up through the city park designs of Frederick Law Olmsted, Ethan Carr places national park landscape architecture within a larger historical context. Despite the difficulties now confronting the parks, their continued ability to attract millions of visitors suggests that their creators succeeded in presenting a captivating vision of a once-wild America.Ethan Carr is a landscape architect and is currently working for the National Park Service. He has taught landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the University of Virginia School of Architecture.