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Serpent, Siren, Maelstrom, and Myth

Sea Stories and Folktales from Around the World

By Gerry Smyth

The sea is beautiful and alluring, but it is also dangerous and deadly. Above all, it is unknowable and untamable. Storytelling offered our ancestors a means to understand and interact with the natural world, and...

Tengautuli Atkuk / The Flying Parka

The Meaning and Making of Parkas in Southwest Alaska

By Ann Fienup-Riordan, Alice Rearden, and Marie Meade

Parkas are part of a living tradition in southwest Alaska. Some are ornamented with tassels, beads, and elaborate stitching; others are simpler fur or birdskin garments. Although fewer fancy parkas are sewn today, many people...

Island X

Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism

By Wendy Cheng

Island X delves into the compelling political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s. Often depicted as compliant model minorities, many were in fact...

Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales

Fossils of Washington State

By Elizabeth A. Nesbitt and David B. Williams

From trilobites near the Idaho border and primitive horses on the Columbia Plateau to giant bird tracks near Bellingham and curious bear-like beasts on the Olympic Peninsula, fossils across Washington State are filled with clues...

Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid

By Willyce Kim. Foreword by Eunsong Kim

Dancer Dawkins is a swift-footed, weed-smoking football stud. Her lover, Jessica, left their place in Los Angeles to join a Napa Valley cult, where she believes she has found salvation. Willie Gutherie, the cigar-smoking, self-proclaimed...

Not Native American Art

Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions

By Janet Catherine Berlo. Foreword by Joe Horse Capture

The faking of Native American art objects has proliferated as their commercial value has increased, but even a century ago experts were warning that the faking of objects ranging from catlinite pipes to Chumash sculpture...

Life and Afterlife in Ancient China

By Jessica Rawson

The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilization still in place today: an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment;...

Biking Uphill in the Rain

The Story of Seattle from behind the Handlebars

By Tom Fucoloro

Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. How did this notoriously hilly and rainy city become so inviting to bicyclists? And what challenges lie ahead for Puget...

Hacking the Underground

Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System

By Raquel Velho

"Minding the gap" while using a wheelchair on the London Underground goes beyond a sharp eye and careful foot placement to avoid a fall: it can entail carrying and deploying a portable ramp to embark...

The Unknown Great

Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History

By Greg Robinson. With Jonathan van Harmelen

Through stories of remarkable people in Japanese American history, The Unknown Great illuminates the diversity of the Nikkei experience from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Acclaimed historian and journalist Greg...

Hatched

Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement

By Gina G. Warren

“Chickens are a lot more mainstream than veganism and a little bit like kombucha: super weird twenty years ago, now somewhat popular and made even more so by logos, brands, and hashtags.” So begins Gina...

Menacing Environments

Ecohorror in Contemporary Nordic Cinema

By Benjamin Bigelow

Known for their progressive environmental policies and nature-loving citizens, Nordic countries also produce what may seem a counterintuitive film genre: ecohorror, where distinctions between humans and nature are blurred in unsettling ways. From slashers to...

The Toxic Ship

The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade

By Simone M. Müller. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia, began a two-year journey, roaming the world's oceans in search of a dumping ground. Its initial destination and then country after...

Vietnam

Asia's Rising Star

By Brook Taylor and Sam Korsmoe

Is Vietnam the world's next Tiger Economy? Can it grow like Taiwan and South Korea did when they were Tiger Economies in the 1980s and '90s? Brook Taylor and Sam Korsmoe bring together more than...

The Empire Looks South

Chinese Perceptions of Cambodia before and during the Kingdom of Angkor

By Peter Harris

The most famous firsthand account of the Kingdom of Angkor was left by the imperial Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan. But Zhou's was not the only portrait of Angkor and the kingdoms that came before it....

Barbara Earl Thomas

The Illuminated Body

By Carolyn Swan Needell

A talented visual storyteller, Barbara Earl Thomas has drawn from history, literature, folklore, mythology, and biblical stories over her forty-year career to reflect the social fabric of our times. Thomas’s figural and narrative imagery has...

Full Light and Perfect Shadow

The Photography of Chao-Chen Yang

By David F. Martin

This is the first study of the work of Chao-Chen Yang (1909–1969), an important Seattle photographer who gained national prominence in the mid-twentieth century.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Yang received his art training at the...

Slapping Leather

Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo

By Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield

Campy and competitive, gay rodeo offers a community of refuge that straddles the urban and rural. Since the mid-1970s, gay rodeos have provided space to both embrace and challenge the idealized masculinity associated with the...

Queer Data Studies

By Patrick Keilty

Data, perilous and powerful, is both a worldmaking and a dismantling force. The collection of data about queer lives and bodies, the consequences of data analysis for queer subjects, and considerations of privacy and consent...

"There Are No Hispanic Stars!"

Collected Writings of a Latino Film Critic in Hollywood, 1921–1939

By Gabriel Navarro. Edited and translated by Colin Gunckel and Laura Isabel Serna

In the 1920s and 1930s a uniquely Mexican American entertainment culture flourished across the southwestern United States. Spanish-language newspapers offered theater listings, coverage of favorite performers, cultural criticism, and serialized novels that thematized entertainment culture....