Overview

The most visited park in the National Parks system, the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway winds along the ridges of the Appalachian mountains in Virginia and North Carolina. According to popular myth, the Parkway was a New Deal """"Godsend for the needy,"""" built without conflict or opposition by landscape architects and planners who traced their uniform vision along a scenic, isolated southern landscape. The historical archives relating to this massive public project, however, tell a different story, which Anne Mitchell Whisnant relates in this history of the seventy-year development of the beloved roadway. Highlighting the roles of key players and stakeholders, Whisnant explores the design and routing of the road; relations among landowners, business interests, and government agencies; environmental impacts; and historical and cultural representation and interpretation. She reveals what the Parkway's seemingly undisturbed scenery tends to obscure: the road owes its appearance as much to the negotiated resolution of conflicts as it does to the natural features of the mountains or the work of landscape designers. Whisnant concludes that debates over how best to preserve and manage the Parkway for the public good within a changing regional and national context will continue for some time to come.

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"""This journey will take us from a place many think they understand to one few would recognize, along a Blue Ridge Parkway almost nobody knows....In the process we will lose some naivete and innocence, but at the same time we will move from myth to understanding, from unquestioning acceptance to critical analysis, from forgetting to remembering, from passivity to action. - from the Introduction"""

This journey will take us from a place many think they understand to one few would recognize, along a Blue Ridge Parkway almost nobody knows....In the process we will lose some naivete and innocence, but at the same time we will move from myth to understanding, from unquestioning acceptance to critical analysis, from forgetting to remembering, from passivity to action. - from the Introduction

Author Information

Anne Mitchell Whisnant received her Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is now Director of Research, Communications, and Programs for the Office of Faculty Governance. She has served as a consultant to the National Park Service and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation. More information about the book is available online at www.superscenic.com.

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