Now in a fully updated edition, this invaluable reference work is a fundamental resource for scholars, students, conservationists, and citizens interested in America's national park system. The extensive collection of documents illustrates the system's creation, development, and management. The documents include laws that established and shaped the system; policy statements on park management; Park Service self-evaluations; and outside studies by a range of scientists, conservation organizations, private groups, and businesses. A new appendix includes summaries of pivotal court cases that have further interpreted the Park Service mission.

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.

A consummate politician without portfolio, Booker T. Washington was a controversial figure throughout much of his life. So he remains today. Yet he had such a passionate belief in the American Creed, progress, black pride, racial uplift, interracial cooperation, and the dignity of labor that he gained the respect of many blacks and whites. His own life as revealed in his autobiography was the classic American success story: a poor black boy struggling up from slavery and the coal mines of West Virginia to unofficial Presidential adviser, internationally known educator, and guest of the crowned heads of Europe. Washington gave Southern blacks a vision of the future unclouded by the lynchings, political powerlessness, and Jim Crow laws which governed their daily lives. At the same time, he gave whites a vision of a Nation no longer divided into warring sections over the place of black people in the body politic. Although Washington was sincerely devoted to racial uplift, he was accused by his black contemporaries of being too passive when it came to asserting the black man's claims to equality. But even his severest critics would concede that he was a great educator, a man who had overcome almost unbelievable obstacles, and a symbol of the promise of America which was realized in the lives of so few blacks. His contemporaries and subsequent generations have recognized him as a great American. In this booklet Barry Mackintosh, a former park historian at Booker T. Washington National Monument, describes the successes and failures of this complex man who made such an impact on his age. John W . Blassingame Yale University

"Wallace Stegner called the national park system one of the United States' best ideas. That good idea has led to an institution that has grown over the past one hundred years, and the park system now encompasses four hundred areas that host over three hundred million visitors in typical year. Jonathan Jarvis (as a ranger, biologist, and director of the National Park Service in the Obama administration) and Destry Jarvis (as an advocate, policy analyst, and lobbyist) have worked to better the parks for over forty years. They offer here a history of the National Park Service (NPS) and an argument for the NPS to become an independent agency--similar to the Smithsonian Institution and separated from the Department of the Interior. Their reasoning relates to politics, finances, and science, and their proposal aims to safeguard the future of our national parks"--