Foregrounding art's influence on the nation—from early far Western photography and painting, as well as work by contemporary California Native American artists—Tyler Green reveals the origin of the national parks.

  In Claiming Yosemite art critic and historian Tyler Green presents the invention of national parks within a broad and complex national history influenced by early artworks of Yosemite. This art was made and shared across the Union only after the state of California and the US Army engaged in a statewide genocidal campaign against California Native peoples, including within Yosemite Valley. In the East, that art was first exhibited in the context of some of the most consequential moments of the Civil War, building an association between Yosemite and the Union cause that motivated Congress and President Abraham Lincoln to invent the first national park there.

  Drawing on extensive new research, Green explains how the Ahwahnechee and their ancestors anthropogenically created the Yosemite that the settlers came to love through a sophisticated fire practice that the settlers misunderstood so thoroughly that it motivated their drive to "preserve" the valley. Across a dramatic narrative, Green reveals how transcendentalist minister Thomas Starr King, photographer Carleton Watkins, painter Albert Bierstadt, and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted helped create the first national park, and how Congress and Lincoln, who signed the bill establishing US Yosemite, went along.