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

As the United States engaged in a civil war, abolished slavery, and remade the government in the 1860s, the public park emerged as a product of these dramatic changes. A central figure directly connected with abolition, the Civil War, and the dawn of urban and national parks is Frederick Law Olmsted whose pre-war journalism about the South, design work on Central Park, and ground-breaking Yosemite Report created an intellectual framework for the “park idea.”

Marking the bicentennial of Olmsted’s birth, this new book by Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr offers a new, more complex and inclusive interpretation of how the American park—urban and national—came to figure so prominently in our cultural identity.

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