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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...

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,...

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...

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...

My Unforgotten Seattle

By Ron Chew. Foreword by Carey Quan Gelernter

Third-generation Seattleite, historian, journalist, and museum visionary Ron Chew spent more than five decades fighting for Asian American and social justice causes in Seattle. In this deeply personal memoir, he documents the tight-knit community he...

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...

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,...

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,...

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast

By Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Aldona Jonaitis

Inseparable from its communities, Northwest Coast art functions aesthetically and performatively beyond the scope of non-Indigenous scholarship, from demonstrating kinship connections to manifesting spiritual power. Contributors to this volume foreground Indigenous understandings in recognition of...

The River That Made Seattle

A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish

By BJ Cummings

With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Chief Se’alth and his allies fished and lived in villages here and...

Walking the High Desert

Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail

By Ellen Waterston

Former high desert rancher Ellen Waterston writes of a wild, essentially roadless, starkly beautiful part of the American West. Following the recently created 750-mile Oregon Desert Trail, she embarks on a creative and inquisitive exploration,...

Haboo

Native American Stories from Puget Sound

By Vi Hilbert, Jill La Pointe, Thom Hess

The stories and legends of the Lushootseed-speaking people of Puget Sound represent an important part of the oral tradition by which one generation hands down beliefs, values, and customs to another. Vi Hilbert grew up...

Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast

The Pacific Northwest and British Columbia

By Collin Varner

The lush Pacific Northwest coast is home to a multitude of edible and medicinal flora, from marine plants to be harvested in tide pools to edible mushrooms ready to be gleaned from the forest floor....

After the Blast

The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens

By Eric Wagner

On May 18, 1980, people all over the world watched with awe and horror as Mount St. Helens erupted. Fifty-seven people were killed and hundreds of square miles of what had been lush forests and...

Proud Raven, Panting Wolf

Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks

By Emily L. Moore

Among Southeast Alaska’s best-known tourist attractions are its totem parks, showcases for monumental wood sculptures by Tlingit and Haida artists. Although the art form is centuries old, the parks date back only to the waning...

The Whale and the Cupcake

Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska

By Julia O'Malley. Foreword by Kim Severson

From fish and fiddleheads to salmonberries and Spam, Alaskan cuisine spans the two extremes of locally abundant wild foods and shelf-stable ingredients produced thousands of miles away. As immigration shapes Anchorage into one of the...

Shaping Seattle Architecture

A Historical Guide to the Architects, Second Edition

By Jeffrey Karl Ochsner

The first edition of Shaping Seattle Architecture, published in 1994, introduced readers to Seattle’s architects by showcasing the work of those who were instrumental in creating the region’s built environment. Twenty years later, the second...

Seattle, Past to Present

By Roger Sale. Introduction by Knute Berger

Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present has become a beloved reflection of Seattle’s history and its possible futures as imagined in 1976, when the book was first published. Drawing on demographic analysis, residential surveys, portraiture,...