Washington University Press Search Results Page

Red Harbor

Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest

By Aaron Goings

Brings to life Grays Harbor's fiery legacy of class conflict

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Grays Harbor was the Lumber Capital of the World. While thousands of lumber and maritime workers fought for...

The Tlingit in Sitka

The Photography of Elbridge W. Merrill

By Sergei Kan

A rare window into the changing lives of Native Alaskans between the late 1800s and 1920s

Lured north by the Klondike gold rush, Elbridge W. Merrill settled in Sitka, Alaska, and took up a career as a...

Wrecked

Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific

By Coll Thrush

A provocative retelling of shipwreck tales from the Northwest Coast

The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar...

Fighting for the Puyallup Tribe

A Memoir

By Ramona Bennett Bill

A compelling on-the-ground account of Native activism in the Northwest

A relentless advocate for Native rights, Ramona Bennett Bill has been involved in the battles waged by the Puyallup and other Northwest tribes around fishing...

Seattle Walks

Discovering History and Nature in the City

By David B. Williams

An updated and expanded new edition of the definitive walking guide to Seattle

One of America's most walkable cities, Seattle rewards urban trekkers with expansive scenery and architectural and historical riches. The second edition of this...

Biking Uphill in the Rain

The Story of Seattle from behind the Handlebars

Finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction

The rise of an improbable bike culture in the Emerald City

Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine....

Stomp and Shout

R&B and the Origins of Northwest Rock and Roll

Finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction

Parking lot rumbles, teen dance riots, and the rise of the Northwest Sound

Long before the world discovered grunge, the Pacific Northwest was already home to...

Alaska Native Resilience

Voices from World War II

By Holly Miowak Guise

Alaska Native elders remember wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamation

The US government justified its World War II occupation of Alaska as a defense against Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian Islands, but it equally served to...

Rising Tides and Tailwinds

The Story of the Port of Seattle

By Casey McNerthney, Kit Oldham, and Peter Blecha. With a new foreword by Senator Patty Murray and a new afterword by Stephen P. Metruck and Lance Lyttle

A century ago, Seattle was held hostage by its own waterfront. Competing railroad companies built a chaotic sprawl of rail lines, docks, and warehouses along the shoreline of Elliott Bay, creating conditions so bad that...

Oregon's Others

Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State in the Early Twentieth Century

By Kimberly Jensen

Nativism, pseudoscience, and the campaign against the enemy within

In the era of the First World War and its aftermath, the quest to identify, restrict, and punish internal enemy “others,” combined with eugenic thinking, severely curtailed...

A Will to Serve

Stories of Patience, Persistence, and Friends Made Along the Way

By Jim Ellis and Jennifer Ott. Foreword by Sally Jewell. Afterword by Gary Locke

The autobiography of an indefatigable visionary and citizen activist

Jim Ellis was one of the most influential and impactful civic leaders of Seattle's and Washington's recent history. Though he never sought elected office, his vision and...

Treaty Justice

The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights

By Charles Wilkinson

In 1974, Judge George Boldt issued a ruling that affirmed the fishing rights and tribal sovereignty of Native nations in Washington State. The Boldt Decision transformed Indigenous law and resource management across the United States...

Heartbreak City

Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress

By Shaun Scott

How the city's marginalized communities have historically used sports as a tool for resilience and resistance

To cities, sports have never been just entertainment. Progressive urbanites across the United States have used athletics to address persistent...

Skid Road

On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle

By Josephine Ensign

A finalist for the Washington State Book Award

Affluent Seattle has one of the highest numbers of unhoused people in the United States. In 2021 an estimated 40,800 people experienced homelessness in Seattle and King County...

Seattle from the Margins

Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City

By Megan Asaka

The creation of Seattle and the displacement of those who built it

From the origins of the city in the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II, Seattle's urban workforce consisted overwhelmingly of migrant...

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...

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,...

Writing Labor’s Emancipation

The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox

By Greg Hall

Jay Fox (1870–1961) was a journalist, intellectual, and labor militant whose influence rippled across the country. In Writing Labor's Emancipation, historian Greg Hall traces Fox's unorthodox life to highlight the shifting dynamics in US labor...

Pioneering Death

The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon

By Peter Boag

On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot his parents and a neighbor in a gruesome act that reverberated beyond the small confines of Montgomery's Oregon farming community. The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery's...