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:

1. the conduct of the California Genocide;
2. sectional tensions surrounding the Civil War; and
3. 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.