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Dissertation Information for Jeffrey Peter Pappas

NAME:
- Jeffrey Peter Pappas

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Arizona State University (USA) (2003)

ADVISORS:
- Jannelle Warren-Findley

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Robert A. Trennert Jr.
- Stephen J. Pyne

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Forest scholars: The early history of nature guiding at Yosemite National Park, 1913--1925

Abstract: As the first nature guiding program in the National Park System, the Yosemite Nature Guide Service is an ideal topic for a comprehensive historical narrative. Its unique position as such was largely due to the plotting of Stephen T. Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, and the administrative mastermind behind the origins of nature guiding at Yosemite. He, along with Dr. Harold C. Bryant, the director of education and research at the California Fish and Game Commission, brought the program to Yosemite in 1920, combining the talents of two distinct yet complimentary personalities.

Mather played the role of spokesperson, promoting the national parks as places of extreme nationalism, desired locales of an expanding American empire, which was part and parcel to an invigorated American spirit seeking to finally part with its European past. To Mather, the national parks were as much symbols, indeed, representative landscapes that spoke to a potential for greatness. Bryant, to the contrary, was an exacting field naturalist, a Ph.D. trained ornithologist from the University of California at Berkeley, who brought to Yosemite a deep understanding of the natural world. Less ideological than Mather yet keenly aware of the enormous opportunity to promote the use of education in the national parks, Bryant served Yosemite through his passion for field studies.

In a way this is very much their story, but it is also a story about a national park and the national park idea. It is also a political story. Couched firmly within the progressive era, the Yosemite Nature Guide Service was tied to an expanding role of the federal government, whereby professionals were educated and trained for careers in the public sector. This story also represents the National Park Service at the beginning of its history, an agency whose identity was still very much undefined. Yet in setting out to establish a nature guide service, Mather and Bryant actively engaged the support of several cultural institutions, making the early park service a truly interdependent agency and an unselfish partner whose legacy is one of cooperation and outreach.


MPACT Scores for Jeffrey Peter Pappas

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-02 23:41:37

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Students under Jeffrey Peter Pappas

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None