American Green: Class, Crisis, and the Deployment of Nature in Central Park, Yosemite, and Yellowstone

Stephen A. Germic’s American Green brings geography, ecocriticism, and narrative studies together in a historical materialist consideration of the national(ist) importance of parks in the nineteenth-century United States. Germic offers a compelling analysis of how the legislating and designing of national parks demonstrates the importance of “nature” and of space to articulations of U.S. nationalism. Considering Central Park alongside Yosemite and Yellowstone, he complicates conventional distinctions between urban and rural, city and frontier, east and west to show the ideological implications of these efforts to legislate nature and space….This work absolutely will be a significant contribution to several fields. — Priscilla Wald, Associate Professor of English, Duke University

What emerges in the account is a cohesive and compelling portrait of nineteenth-century concepts of ‘nature’ as ideologically instrumental―intrinsically rather than incidentally connected to the perpetuation of class division and ethnic oppression. — Steven Rosendale, Northern Arizona University

In this carefully argued and well-written book, Stephen Germic explores the spatial and rhetorical histories of two of the public monuments―the urban park and the frontier park―that played crucial roles in the formation of U.S. national identity. American Green will be widely reviewed and become required reading in courses in American studies and cultural studies. — Donald E. Pease Jr., Avalon Chair of Humanities, Dartmouth College