Book Birthdays, Nebraska

Happy Book Birthday to Framing Nature

Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in social media posts, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (Nebraska, 2024) by Yolanda Youngs.

About the Book:

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is an internationally known feature of the North American landscape, attracting more than five million visitors each year. A deep cultural, visual, and social history has shaped the Grand Canyon’s environment into one of America’s most significant representations of nature. Yet the canyon is more than a vacation destination, a movie backdrop, or a scenic viewpoint; it is a real place as well as an abstraction easily summoned in the minds of Americans. The Grand Canyon, or the idea of it, is woven into the fabric of American cultural identity and serves as a cultural reference point—an icon.

In Framing Nature Yolonda Youngs traces the idea of the Grand Canyon as an icon and the ways people came to know it through popular imagery and visual media.

Reviews:

“In an era of accelerating global climate change, the enhanced understanding Yolonda Youngs provides—of how past manipulations of the Grand Canyon’s visual representation influenced our understanding and management of a signature American national park—will assist us as a society in making appropriate decisions about how to manage such natural resources in the future.”—Peter J. Blodgett, H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History at the Huntington Library

“Youngs’ work is an exercise in understanding how viewers process iconic landscapes like the Grand Canyon, showing that while they gain appreciation for these spaces, fully capturing them continues to change through generations, juxtaposing new technologies at hand with the generational rediscovery that often proves elusive.”—Courtney Johnson, Southwestern Historical Quarterly

“An excellent book that advances an understanding of how places such as the Grand Canyon are socially constructed over time, an important and enduring theme within geographical research.”—Lisa Benton-Short, author of The National Mall: No Ordinary Public Space

“Youngs’s methodological approach yields a rich analysis that is both cultural and material and one that will hopefully inspire future scholars to contribute to a scholarly and public conversation about the process of placemaking.”—Sarah Keyes, H-Environment

“Framing Nature is an intriguing book that works well on multiple levels. . . . This could be valuable as a reading in a research methods course.”—E. J. Delaney, CHOICE

Interviews:

Nature Revisited

New Books Network

KJZZ

On Social Media:

Did you know that our outgoing PASG Chair, Dr. Yolonda Youngs, won the 2024 AAG John Brinkerhoff Jackson Prize for her new book, "Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon"? Looking for summer reading? SAVE 40% with code 6AS24. http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/978…

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— Protected Areas Specialty Group – AAG (@pasg-aag.bsky.social) May 20, 2025 at 9:27 AM

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