Ethan Carr
Published by University of Massachusetts Press in association with LALH 2007
Cloth $39.95
To order: University of Massachusetts Press
tel. 800-537-5487, fax 410-516-6998
Winner, John Brinckerhoff Jackson Award, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award
After World War II, Americans visited the national parks in unprecedented numbers, yet Congress held funding at prewar levels, and park conditions steadily declined. To address the problem, the National Park Service completed a ten-year, billion-dollar initiative called “Mission 66” to mark its fiftieth anniversary in 1966. To a significant degree, today’s national park system and the National Park Service are products of the Mission 66 era. The program covered more than one hundred visitor centers; expanded campgrounds, comfort stations, and other public facilities; and created new and wider roads, maintenance buildings, and hundreds of employee residences. Controversial at the time, Mission 66 continues to incite debate over the policies it represented. This book examines the program’s significance and explores the influence of midcentury modernism on landscape design and park planning.
“This is an intelligent and level-headed look at the great promise and the great problems associated with the Park Service’s Mission 66 program. Embedded in it—and in this fascinating book as well—is the age-old dilemma that has plagued our National Parks since their inception, namely, how to make them accessible to everyone while at the same time saving them from those who too often end up ‘loving them to death.’” —Ken Burns, Filmmaker
“This book deserves high praise and wide circulation because of its intellectual scope and analytical, as well as documentary, content. Ethan Carr’s framing of the subject within the wilderness vs. recreation dialectic makes the book valuable beyond the immediate subject. Mission 66 addresses an issue that is central to many of us today and one that will continue to be vigorously debated well into the future.” —Richard Longstreth, George Washington University
“Ethan Carr’s Mission 66 history . . . is among the finest studies of the National Park Service I’ve ever seen. . . . His concluding appraisal of Mission 66 is well reasoned and balanced.” —Barry Mackintosh, former National Park Service agency historian
“As the National Park Service nears its 100th birthday, this unusually engaging book is a must-read for those who care about the past and future of the national parks.” —John Reynolds, Executive Vice President, National Park Foundation
“Carr’s book sheds important light on how Mission 66 came about, how it was executed, how it fit (and sometimes didn’t) with the changing times of postwar America, and most important, how some of the underlying beliefs of the NPS leadership reflected an idea of national parks that can be traced back to its first expression with Frederick Law Olmsted a hundred years earlier.” —Dayton Duncan, author of Out West: A Journey Through Lewis & Clark’s America
“A first-rate addition to the history of our national parks.” —Denis P. Galvin, former Deputy Director, National Park Service
Ethan Carr, Phd, FASLA, is Associate Professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia and the author of Wilderness by Design (1998). He received master’s degrees from Columbia University and Harvard University, and a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art. He has previously worked as a historian for the department of New York City Parks & Recreation and for the National Park Service, where he was the lead historical landscape architect at the Denver Service Center.
Click titles to read published reviews:
Choice
Public Historian
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
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