The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture of the heads of four prominent United States presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt) that is carved into the side of a granite mountain in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. South Dakotan lawyer Doane Robinson conceived the idea for the monument with the aim of attracting tourists to the area. In 1924, Robinson persuaded Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum to design and construct the monument, and after securing congressional approval and funding, construction began on August 10, 1927. The presidents depicted were chosen because of their success in spreading and preserving democracy as well as expanding the territory of the United States. The memorial came under the jurisdiction of the United States National Park Service in 1933, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places after it was completed in 1941. Today it is labeled as a category V protected landscape by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and is visited by over 3,000,000 tourists per year.
Contributed by Madeline Sheehy
Course: Modern Global Environmental History
Instructor: Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg
University of Wisconsin–Madison, US
- Larner, Jesse. Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002.
- Brown, Peter M., Cody L. Wienk, and Amy J. Symstad. "Fire and Forest History at Mount Rushmore." Ecological Applications 18, no. 8 (2008): 1984–99.