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Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History. By Denise D. Meringolo. Public History in Historical Perspective. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, c. 2012. Pp. [xxxiv], 207. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-940-9; cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-1-55849-939-3.)
It has become a truism among environmental historians like myself that the National Park Service, in its efforts to preserve America's wild landscapes, has often been hostile to the legacies of human land use and human history in the national parks. But such critical assessments of the cultural construction of nature in the national parks have ignored the extent to which the National Park Service is, and has long been, in the business of historic preservation and interpretation. Indeed, one could argue that protecting and interpreting the nation's history has quietly become the dominant mission of the National Park Service. In Museums, Monuments, and National...