"In Claiming Yosemite, award-winning writer Tyler Green traces the winding path that led to the invention of the Americas first national park at Yosemite between 1851 and 1866. The familiar Yosemite story is that it was preserved as the first national park because it was beautiful. Thats not wrong, but, as Green shows, its a small piece of a larger, tangled truth. Yes, there was beauty - soaring granite cliffs, towering waterfalls, and a cool river rolling through oak-filled meadows - which was recognized by a small group of Californians whose embrace of nature at a time of national calamity still inspires us today. But behind the full story of the parks creation, we can find the US-forced removal of Native Americans from their homeland, sectional tensions surrounding the Civil War, jockeying for political power in San Francisco and beyond, and a nation eager to expand its imperial ambitions to the edge of the continent. Critical to the story Green is telling are the arts and humanities. Building off previous highly acclaimed work in art history, Green notably explores the pivotal role played by essays and artworks, especially by transcendentalist minister Thomas Starr King, photographer Carleton Watkins, and painter Albert Bierstadt, in persuading a young nation to set aside land for conservation. Green also notably brings the work of modernist and contemporary Native American artists such as Saif Azzuz (Yurok/Libyan), Brian Tripp (Karuk), and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee) into the story as well.

Within the United States, both land preservation and conservation began at Yosemite in ways that will be influential elsewhere in the US, and around the world. To understand how Yosemite became the first national park and the template for much else, Green makes the case that we must be willing to accept complication, and to reckon with our past in the hopes that it will lead to a better future for both the land, the Native people who never ceded Yosemite Valley or the surrounding land to the US, and the rest of us"-- Provided by publisher.