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Stirring Up Seattle

Allied Arts in the Civic Landscape

By R. M. Campbell. Photographs by Roger Schreiber

In the 1950s, the city of Seattle began a transformation from an insular, provincial outpost to a vibrant and cosmopolitan cultural center. As veteran Seattle journalist R. M. Campbell illustrates in Stirring Up Seattle: Allied...

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...

Pioneer Square

Seattle's Oldest Neighborhood

By Mildred T. Andrews, Leonard Garfield

This fascinating history weaves together first-person accounts, photographs, and varied cultural perspectives to shed light on the birthplace of modern Seattle. It reveals that Pioneer Square has always been a barometer of Seattle’s health and...

Skid Road

On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle

By Josephine Ensign

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 during the year, not counting the significant...

Power for the People

A History of Seattle City Light

By David W. Wilma and Walt Crowley

Since before Seattle voters decided in 1902 to build their own lighting plant, City Light has been a source of fierce civic pride for its independence from "foreign" corporations, its impressive public works projects, and...

Sketchbook

A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School

By William Cumming

William Cumming began as a self-taught artist who grew up in Tukwila, a small town outside Seattle. In 1937, at the age of twenty, he met Morris Graves, who was at that time working in...

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....

The Nature of Gold

An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush

By Kathryn Morse. Foreword by William Cronon

In 1896, a small group of prospectors discovered a stunningly rich pocket of gold at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, and in the following two years thousands of individuals traveled to the...

Uncle Rico's Encore

Mostly True Stories of Filipino Seattle

By Peter Bacho

From the 1950s through the 1970s, blue-collar Filipino Americans, or Pinoys, lived a hardscrabble existence. Immigrant parents endured blatant racism, sporadic violence, and poverty while their US-born children faced more subtle forms of racism, such...

Looking for Betty MacDonald

The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

By Paula Becker

Betty Bard MacDonald (1907–1958), the best-selling author of The Egg and I and the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s books, burst onto the literary scene shortly after the end of World War II. Readers embraced her...

The Afterlife of Sai Baba

Competing Visions of a Global Saint

By Karline McLain

Nearly a century after his death, the image of Sai Baba, the serene old man with the white beard from Shirdi village in Maharashtra, India, is instantly recognizable to most South Asians (and many Westerners)...

Walking Washington's History

Ten Cities

By Judy Bentley

Walking Washington’s History: Ten Cities, a follow-up to Judy Bentley’s bestselling Hiking Washington’s History, showcases the state’s engaging urban history through guided walks in ten major cities. Using narrated walks, maps, and historic photographs, Bentley...

Wings of Power

Boeing and the Politics of Growth in the Northwest

By Terry M Sell

Through most of its history, the Boeing Company has been one of the biggest providers of jobs and wealth in western Washington State. But in the 1990s, the company found itself a target of local...

Picturing the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition

The Photographs of Frank H. Nowell

By Nicolette Bromberg and John Stamets

For those who experienced it, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was a time of wonder in a "citadel set in stars" -- a grand world's fair that transformed the summer of 1909 in Seattle into a whirl...

Becoming Citizens

Family Life and the Politics of Disability

By Susan Schwartzenberg

Following the Second World War, a generation of Seattle parents went against conventional medical wisdom and chose to bring up their children with developmental disabilities in the community. This book presents a stunning visual narrative...

Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories

By Peter Bacho

The book opens with the annual spring dispatch, by the Seattle-based Filipino union, of thousands of Filipino workers to the Alaska salmon canneries. We meet characters who reappear throughout the stories: Vince, the tough but...

Experiences in a Promised Land

Essays in Pacific Northwest History

By G. Thomas Edwards and Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes

The Pacific Northwest, like many other regions of the United States, has been touted as the Promised Land. As early as the 1830s, “Oregon fever” brought missionaries, promoters, speculators, politicians, and settlers to the nation’s...