"The story of how one woman's long love affair with New York's Central Park led her to a job in which she was able to organize the rescue of the park from its serious decline in the 1970s, returning it to the beautiful place of recreational opportunity and spiritual sustenance it is today. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers opens with a quick survey of her early life--a middle-class upbringing in Texas; college at Wellesley, marriage, a degree in City Planning...

A different narrative of the founding of the national park system. For far too long, all the credit for the national parks has been vested with either mythic "rugged Western pioneers" or a "visionary" like John Muir or Theodore Roosevelt. It is time to revisit Olmsted's Yosemite Report and its enduring vision of popular government using its resources to improve people's lives as an important element to those who fought for a new birth of American...