I found while reading this that I always think about countries based on their landmarks. For instance when I think of France, I think Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral. When I think of China, I think of the Great Wall. When I think of Nepal, I think of Mount Everest. We treat both man made and natural landmarks as symbols of a country often as much as the traditional symbols of flags and currency. If Americans were looking for landmarks that they could be proud of, the United States was full of them and that would logically be an area of great national pride. Those are the places that in modern day, we see millions of international tourists who travel all the way here just to see places like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park, or redwood trees in Muir Woods. People also travel here in modern day for manmade sites like Disney World, The Empire State Building, or the monuments in Washington D.C., but in the 19th century those man made icons didn't really exist and therefore it seems logical that the natural wonders of our land would be valuable to Americans as a source of pride and therefore in need of preservation like with Yellowstone or Hetch Hetchy. The positive to this is that we chose to preserve rather than destroy because we saw value in beauty. The danger of course was mostly for Native Americans who lived on the land where they were being pushed off or told they could no longer hunt because of preservation. The concept of beauty and wild being a reason to feel like an American by expanding into the frontier led to increased conflict because those doing the expanding felt like conquerors of the wilderness and therefore superior to those who lived there and were being conquered. This made me think of Grant's concepts of Eugenics which in the United States during this time was called Manifest Destiny. The idea that God had told white people, especially Protestants, that they should expand from sea to shining sea because it was God's will that they should conquer implies that God was on their side and not on the Native Americans side. To parallel with the Grant article, the Americans were like the "Master race" while the Natives were the "backward race." I found the Grant article disturbing in many ways but especially the argument that those who conquer are superior racially to those who are conquered. Nash in chapters 9 and 10 begins exploring what happens as the frontier no longer really exists and how that was jarring to those who thought being powerful required conquering and there was nothing left to conquer. I think this is likely why the U.S. started to become more imperialistic during this transition. While I see the dangers of nationalism in general, I also think that having national pride for your nation's beauty is not in itself a bad thing and I'm often in awe of how incredibly beautiful and diverse our nation's landscape is.