Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature

by Barringer, Mark Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780700611676
• ISBN10: 0700611673
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas

Summary

For over a century, Yellowstone National Park has been a monument to wildness in America. But long before flames swept through Yellowstone in 1988, that wildness had come under fire from encroachments that were making the park one of our nation's most commodified pieces of real estate.

For as long as they've existed, parks like Yellowstone have been the scene of some of the most intensive commercial activity in the American West. Selling Yellowstone recounts the story of such activities in our oldest park from the 1870s through the 1960s. It is the first book to examine critically the place of business in the development of America's national parks, demonstrating the prominent role played by profit-driven entrepreneurs in shaping the physical landscape of what is generally perceived as unaltered wilderness.

Challenging popular perceptions that our national parks are protected from commercialism, Mark Barringer reveals how businessmen, with the support of the National Park Service, marketed Yellowstone as a museum of mythology: a landscape created to look li

Author Biography

Mark Daniel Barringer is assistant professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Introduction	1	(7)
Beginnings	8	(26)
Harry's Grand Tour	34	(25)
Transitions	59	(25)
Defending the Empire	84	(25)
Photo Gallery
The Coming Crisis	109	(19)
Mission 66	128	(23)
Collapse	151	(22)
Conclusion	173	(10)
Notes	183	(32)
Bibliography	215	(14)
Index	229