Tyler Green is an award-winning historian, critic and author whose work examines the ways in which artists and their work have impacted national histories. Green is also the producer and host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, the leading audio program about art.

Green’s new book, Claiming Yosemite: the Civil War, the California Genocide, and the Invention of National Parks will be published by Stanford’s Redwood Press imprint in April 2027. For the first time, Claiming Yosemite tells the full story of why and how the US invented the national park in 1851-66.

There were three key factors: the conduct of the California Genocide; sectional tensions surrounding the Civil War; and Unionist essays and artworks. Based on new research into the genocide, early art of Yosemite, the Civil War, and more, Claiming Yosemite is the first new history of the invention of national parks since Hans Huth’s 1948 Sierra Club Bulletin article “Yosemite: The Story of an Idea.”

Throughout, Claiming Yosemite emphasizes that Yosemite’s US history and the invention of the national park there are substantially art histories. Claiming Yosemite presents new research into how Watkins’s and Bierstadt’s art motivated the national park idea, and also emphasizes that art’s influence on Yosemite and our national parks is not necessarily past: the book foregrounds the work of twentieth and twenty-first century Native American artists, mostly California Native Americans, who have broadened and revised our knowledge of these pasts and presents. Just as the US learned about Yosemite from artists in the 1860s, we may again today. Claiming Yosemite may be pre-ordered via Bookshop and Amazon.

Green’s most recently published book is Emerson’s Nature and the Artists: Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea. It was published by Prestel in October 2021. The book features a new consideration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic 1836 text, new research that reveals how Nature was informed by Emerson’s engagement with American art, and critical analysis of how the ideas Emerson presented in Nature informed American art for 100 years after Nature was published. Emerson’s Nature also examines how Emerson joined his Anglo-Saxonist white-race theory to ideas about nature in ways that helped bake whiteness into the American landscape tradition. The book features about 75 artworks reproduced in-line with Green’s essays and within the text of Emerson’s Nature. In adherence with Emerson’s landmark definition of landscape as a public commons, all of the images in the book come from museums and libraries with open-access policies. It is available in both the US and in Europe.

Green’s first book was Carleton Watkins: Making the West American. It was published by University of California Press in 2018 and won the 2019 California Book Awards gold medal for contribution to publishing. Purchase it from your favorite bookstore or website via the links here.

Among the books featuring Green’s work are Phyllida Barlow: Collected Lectures, Writings, and Interviews, Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 360°: Views on the Collection, Proving Ground, a monograph from 2018 Guggenheim Fellow David Maisel, and the exhibition catalogue for Anne Appleby’s 2021 exhibition at the Missoula (Mont.) Art Museum.

Green’s forthcoming books include:

• A not-yet-titled project that reveals how visual art has impacted the United States. This book will identify artworks important to the evolution of the nation, investigate the moments of their production, presentation, and re-presentations, and explain how they have informed the construction of our country between the 1780s and the present. This book will also recognize that art continues to influence the US. In addition to investigating historical artworks, it will present ways in which today’s artists are revising, addressing, and transforming our understandings of the nation’s story, stories that have the potential to unite us just as yesteryear’s art did.