Conservationist Horace Albright was the first assistant director of the National Park Service under Stephen Mather. They were responsible for unifying the national parks and initiating historic preservation policies.

In its infancy, the movement to protect wilderness areas in the United States was motivated less by perceived threats from industrial and agricultural activities than by concern over the impacts of automobile owners seeking recreational opportunities in wild areas. Countless commercial and government purveyors vigorously promoted the mystique of travel to breathtakingly scenic places, and roads and highways were built to facilitate such travel. By the early 1930s, New Deal public works programs brought these trends to a startling crescendo. The dilemma faced by stewards of the nation's public lands was how to protect the wild qualities of those places while accommodating, and often encouraging, automobile-based tourism. By 1935, the founders of the Wilderness Society had become convinced of the impossibility of doing both. In Driven Wild, Paul Sutter traces the intellectual and cultural roots of the modern wilderness movement from about 1910 through the 1930s, with tightly drawn portraits of four Wilderness Society founders--Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall. Each man brought a different background and perspective to the advocacy for wilderness preservation, yet each was spurred by a fear of what growing numbers of automobiles, aggressive road building, and the meteoric increase in Americans turning to nature for their leisure would do to the country’s wild places. As Sutter discovered, the founders of the Wilderness Society were "driven wild"--pushed by a rapidly changing country to construct a new preservationist ideal. Sutter demonstrates that the birth of the movement to protect wilderness areas reflected a growing belief among an important group of conservationists that the modern forces of capitalism, industrialism, urbanism, and mass consumer culture were gradually eroding not just the ecology of North America, but crucial American values as well. For them, wilderness stood for something deeply sacred that was in danger of being lost, so that the movement to protect it was about saving not just wild nature, but ourselves as well.

Carr delves into the planning and motivations of the people who wanted to preserve America's scenic geography. He demonstrates that by drawing on historical antecedents, landscape architects and planners carefully crafted each addition to maintain maximum picturesque wonder. Tracing the history of landscape park design from British gardens up through the city park designs of Frederick Law Olmsted, Carr places national park landscape architecture within a larger historical context.

Two men played a crucial role in the creation and early history of the National Park Service: Stephen T. Mather, a public relations genius of sweeping vision, and Horace M. Albright, an able lawyer and administrator who helped transform that vision into reality. In Creating the National Park Service, Albright and his daughter, Marian Albright Schenck, reveal the previously untold story of the critical "missing years" in the history of the service. During this period, 1917 and 1918, Mather's problems with manic depression were kept hidden from public view, and Albright, his able and devoted assistant, served as acting director and assumed Mather's responsibilities. Albright played a decisive part in the passage of the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916; the formulation of principles and policies for management of the parks; the defense of the parks against exploitation by ranchers, lumber companies, and mining interests during World War I; and other issues crucial to the future of the fledgling park system. This authoritative behind-the-scenes history sheds light on the early days of the most popular of all federal agencies while painting a vivid picture of American life in the early twentieth century.

In his engaging book Windshield Wilderness, David Louter explores the relationship between automobiles and national parks, and how together they have shaped our ideas of wilderness. National parks, he argues, did not develop as places set aside from the modern world, but rather came to be known and appreciated through technological progress in the form of cars and roads, leaving an enduring legacy of knowing nature through machines. With a lively style and striking illustrations, Louter traces the history of Washington State’s national parks -- Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades -- to illustrate shifting ideas of wilderness as scenic, as roadless, and as ecological reserve. He reminds us that we cannot understand national parks without recognizing that cars have been central to how people experience and interpret their meaning, and especially how they perceive them as wild places. Windshield Wilderness explores what few histories of national parks address: what it means to view parks from the road and through a windshield. Building upon recent interpretations of wilderness as a cultural construct rather than as a pure state of nature, the story of autos in parks presents the preservation of wilderness as a dynamic and nuanced process.Windshield Wilderness illuminates the difficulty of separating human-modified landscapes from natural ones, encouraging us to recognize our connections with nature in national parks.