Washington University Press Search Results Page

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,...

Olmsted in Seattle

Creating a Park System for a Modern City

By Jennifer Ott and the Staff of HistoryLink

In the midst of galloping growth at the turn of the twentieth century, Seattle’s city leaders seized on the confluence of a roaring economy with the City Beautiful movement to hire the Olmsted Brothers landscape...

Seattle at 150

Stories of the City through 150 Objects from the Seattle Municipal Archives

By HistoryLink Staff, edited by Jennifer Ott. Foreword by Monica Simmons, City Clerk. Afterword by Mayor Jenny Durkan

Seattle has packed a lot of history into the 150 years since its incorporation. Much of that history—the stories, the people, dialogue and debate, conflict and vision—is preserved in the Seattle Municipal Archives. The collection’s...

Transit

The Story of Public Transportation in the Puget Sound Region

By Jim Kershner and the Staff of HistoryLink

Ever since the first streetcars rumbled through the streets of Seattle in 1884, public transportation in the Puget Sound region has been a wild roller-coaster ride, replete with scandals, triumphs, and momentous turning points. A...

The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnúwit Átawish Nch'inch'imamí

Reflections on Sahaptin Ways

By Virginia R. Beavert and Janne L. Underriner

The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnuwit Atawish Nch’inch’imamí is a treasure trove of material for those interested in Native American culture. Author Virginia Beavert grew up in a traditional, Indian-speaking household. Both her parents and...

The Propeller under the Bed

A Personal History of Homebuilt Aircraft

By Eileen A. Bjorkman

On July 25, 2010, Arnold Ebneter flew across the country in a plane he designed and built himself, setting an aviation world record for aircraft of its class. He was eighty-two at the time and...

The Last Wilderness

By Murray Morgan. Introduction by Tim McNulty

Murray Morgan’s classic history of the Olympic Peninsula, originally published in 1955, evokes a remote American wilderness “as large as the state of Massachusetts, more rugged than the Rockies, its lowlands blanketed by a cool...

Reclaiming the Reservation

Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed

By Alexandra Harmon

In the 1970s the Quinault and Suquamish, like dozens of Indigenous nations across the United States, asserted their sovereignty by applying their laws to everyone on their reservations. This included arresting non-Indians for minor offenses,...

Razor Clams

Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest

By David Berger

In this lively history and celebration of the Pacific razor clam, David Berger shares with us his love affair with the glossy, gold-colored Siliqua patula and gets into the nitty-gritty of how to dig, clean,...

The Deepest Roots

Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island

By Kathleen Alcalá

As friends began “going back to the land” at the same time that a health issue emerged, Kathleen Alcalá set out to reexamine her relationship with food at the most local level. Remembering her parents,...

Puget's Sound

A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound

By Murray Morgan. Introduction by Michael Sean Sullivan

With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of Tacoma, “the City of Destiny,” and southern Puget Sound, where...

Concrete Mama

Prison Profiles from Walla Walla

By Ethan Hoffman, Dan Berger

Journalists John McCoy and Ethan Hoffman spent four months inside the walls of the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla in 1978, just as Washington, once a leader in prison reform, abandoned its focus on...

The Seattle General Strike

By Robert L. Friedheim. Introduction, Photo Essay, and Afterword by James N. Gregory

“We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!” With these words echoing throughout the city, on February 6, 1919, 65,000 Seattle...

Gold Rush Manliness

Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope

By Christopher Herbert

The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. Yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of...

John Okada

The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy

By Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, Floyd Cheung

No-No Boy, John Okada’s only published novel, centers on a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the country that incarcerated him and his people in World War II and, upon release from federal prison...

In Defense of Wyam

Native-White Alliances and the Struggle for Celilo Village

By Katrine Barber

When the US Army Corps of Engineers began planning construction of The Dalles Dam at Celilo Village in the mid-twentieth century, it was clear that this traditional fishing, commerce, and social site of immense importance...

The Spokane River

By Paul Lindholdt

From Lake Coeur d’Alene to its confluence with the Columbia, the Spokane River travels 111 miles of varied and often spectacular terrain—rural, urban, in places wild. The river has been a trading and gathering place...

Skid Road

An Informal Portrait of Seattle

By Murray Morgan. Introduction by Mary Ann Gwinn

Skid Road tells the story of Seattle “from the bottom up,” offering an informal and engaging portrait of the Emerald City’s first century, as seen through the lives of some of its most colorful citizens....

Indian Fishing

Early Methods on the Northwest Coast

By Hilary Stewart

First published in 1977 and unavailable for several years, Indian Fishing is more than a sterile account of the technology of fishing; it considers the momentous role of fish and fishing in the lives of...

Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest

By Linda Carlson. With a new preface

“Company town.” The words evoke images of rough-and-tumble loggers and gritty miners, of dreary shacks in isolated villages, of wages paid in scrip good only at price-gouging company stores of paternalistic employers. But these stereotypes...