Washington University Press Search Results Page

Painful Beauty

Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

By Megan A. Smetzer

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively...

Anakú Iwachá

Yakama Legends and Stories

By Virginia R. Beavert, Michelle M. Jacob, Joana W. Jansen

Central to the Yakama oral tradition, storytelling enables Tribal Elders to share lessons, values, and customs with younger generations across the Columbia River plateau and the Pacific Northwest. Drawn from a time before the coming...

Hiking Washington's History

By Judy Bentley and Craig Romano

For thousands of years people have traveled across Washington’s spectacular terrain, establishing footpaths and roads to reach hunting grounds and coal mines high in the mountains, fishing sites and trade emporiums on the rivers, forests...

Art of the Northwest Coast

By Aldona Jonaitis

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often...

Alden Mason

Paintings

By Roger Hull. with essays by Regina Hackett and Robert Ayers. Foreword by Chuck Close

Born in Everett, Washington, painter Alden Mason (1919–2014) earned his MFA from the University of Washington in 1947, launching what would become an extraordinary career as both artist and teacher. He reinvented his style several...

Pushed Out

Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West

By Ryanne Pilgeram

What happens to rural communities when their traditional economic base collapses? When new money comes in, who gets left behind? Pushed Out offers a rich portrait of Dover, Idaho, whose transformation from “thriving timber mill...

The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence

Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874

By Robert T. Boyd

In the late 1700s when European colonizers arrived on the Northwest Coast, they reported the presence of vigorous, diverse cultures—Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Coast Salish, and Chinookan—with a population conservatively estimated at more...

Homewaters

A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound

By David B. Williams

Not far from Seattle skyscrapers live 150-year-old clams, more than 250 species of fish, and underwater kelp forests as complex as any terrestrial ecosystem. For millennia, vibrant Coast Salish communities have lived beside these waters...

Fear No Man

Don James, the '91 Huskies, and the Seven-Year Quest for a National Football Championship

By Mike Gastineau. Foreword by Nick Saban

In 1984 the University of Washington Huskies won every game but one, ranking second in national polls. For most coaches, such a season would be a career pinnacle. But for Don James second place motivated...

Great Bear Wild

Dispatches from a Northern Rainforest

By Ian McAllister. Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The fabled Great Bear Rainforest stretches up the rugged Pacific coast from northern Vancouver Island to southern Alaska. A longtime resident of the area, award-winning photographer and conservationist Ian McAllister takes us on a deeply...

Herring and People of the North Pacific

Sustaining a Keystone Species

By Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss

Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved...

The Grizzly in the Driveway

The Return of Bears to a Crowded American West

By Robert Chaney

Four decades ago, the areas around Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks sheltered the last few hundred surviving grizzlies in the Lower 48 states. Protected by the Endangered Species Act, their population has surged to more...

Becoming Nisei

Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma

By Lisa M. Hoffman and Mary L. Hanneman

Tacoma’s vibrant Nihonmachi of the 1920s and '30s was home to a significant number of first generation Japanese immigrants and their second generation American children, and these families formed tight-knit bonds despite their diverse religious,...

Emerald Street

A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

By Daudi Abe. Foreword by Sir Mix-A-Lot

From the first rap battles in Seattle’s Central District to the Grammy stage, hip hop has shaped urban life and the music scene of the Pacific Northwest for more than four decades. In the early...

Post Romantic

Poems

By Kathleen Flenniken

In her wide-ranging third book, poet Kathleen Flenniken undertakes the difficult task of re-seeing what is before us. Post Romantic fuses personal memory with national and ecological upheaval, interweaving narratives of family, nuclear history, love...

Building Reuse

Sustainability, Preservation, and the Value of Design

By Kathryn Rogers Merlino

The construction and operation of buildings is responsible for 41 percent of all primary energy use and 48 percent of all carbon emissions, and the impact of the demolition and removal of an older building...

Alaska

An American Colony

By Stephen W. Haycox

Alaska often looms large as a remote, wild place with endless resources and endlessly independent, resourceful people. Yet it has always been part of larger stories: the movement of Indigenous peoples from Asia into the...

Oregon

This Storied Land

By William G. Robbins

Oregon’s landscape boasts brilliant waterfalls, towering volcanoes, productive river valleys, and far-reaching high deserts. People have lived in the region for at least twelve thousand years, during which they established communities; named places; harvested fish,...

Anticipating Future Environments

Climate Change, Adaptive Restoration, and the Columbia River Basin

By Shana Lee Hirsch

Drought. Wildfire. Extreme flooding. How does climate change affect the daily work of scientists? Ecological restoration is often premised on the idea of returning a region to an earlier, healthier state. Yet the effects of...

The Port of Missing Men

Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest

By Aaron Goings

In the early twentieth century so many dead bodies surfaced in the rivers around Aberdeen, Washington, that they were nicknamed the “floater fleet.” When Billy Gohl (1873–1927), a powerful union official, was arrested for murder,...