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====Historical Antecedents====
Early in its usage, the word “park “contrasts with the ideal garden, which was a landscape designed for the pleasure of humans. First used as a Middle English word, “park” drew on German and French words related to pens, pen folds, and paddocks. The Oxford English Dictionary describes park as a word that “was originally a legal term designating land held by royal grant for keeping game animals: this was enclosed and therefore distinct from a forest or chase.” This distinction from a medieval forest is crucial, as “forests” at the time were wild places largely beyond the control of humans and left to their own natural progression whereas “parks” were for the pleasure of people who wanted to engage in recreation and subject to some level of land management.
Furthering the human control over the space, the English example also introduces the gamekeeper, an individual employed by the property owner for the express purpose of managing the land in a way that encourages balance. Thus from its earliest use, “park” indicated a special place, dedicated to the protection of a natural state of order, but crucially distinct from notions of true wilderness and necessarily managed by a gamekeeper. Wholesome and pastoral landscapes also did not compare to the “wilderness” of the American West. As one of the most frequently cited differences between American and European conceptions of natural recreational space, this relationship with “wilderness” and the protection of wild places is the distinguishing feature in the history of intensive management for the purposes of recreation and the relative human impact on the land.
Before the English arrived in North America, a tradition of enclosing land for the purpose of aristocratic recreation already existed in the English countryside, but this type of parkland evolved in a crowded countryside where few people owned land and the whole countryside was known to its residents. As the European tradition of country parks and gardens evolved in tandem with a heavily populated rural landscape these starting conditions influenced the way English parks developed. In places like England, France, and Germany, the evolution of a certain “natural” landscape that included spaces for recreation and commons areas throughout the countryside not only offers an alternative to the large parks of the American West, but in the Romantic era authors even ascribed to the landscape a sort of cultural determinism in addition to its natural beauty.
====Natural Monuments====
[[File: |thumbnail|300px|left|Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park]]Another significant contribution to the creation of national parks in the United States also comes from Americans looking to Europe, but in this case it was responsible for the creation of something new rather than copying a European tradition. When Americans visited Europe, the Middle East, and Asia there were struck by the massive monuments built by ancient civilizations. With a relatively young country and little desire to create pyramids, coliseums, or great walls, many Americans looked to the vast natural splendor of the West as their answer to Europe’s monuments. Early parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite existed as unique examples of natural environments unlike anything else on the North American continent. With the passage of the 1906 Antiquities Act, presidential authority to set aside lands as national monuments further crystallized the idea that certain natural features of the United States were worthy of consideration as part of the country’s patrimony. After the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, the infrastructure of these parks continued to develop until ultimately average citizens visited the parks to see and experience their natural beauty.
====Why America?====
