Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park

Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park. Cover.

Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park. Cover.

Berghahn Books, 2014.

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Kupper, Patrick. Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park. Translated by Giselle Weiss. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014.

Winner of the 2013 Turku Book Award.

The history of the Swiss National Park, from its creation in the years before the Great War to the present, is told for the first time in this book. Unlike Yellowstone Park, which embodied close cooperation between state-supported conservation and public recreation, the Swiss park put in place an extraordinarily strong conservation program derived from a close alliance between the state and scientific research. This deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a “scientific national park,” thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide. (Text from Berghahn Books)

The Rachel Carson Center, the ESEH, and Berghahn Books (New York and Oxford) partner on the publication of the peer-reviewed book series The Environment in History: International Perspectives. The series strives to bridge both national and disciplinary divides, with a particular emphasis on European, transnational, and comparative research.