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Seattle from the Margins

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

By Megan Asaka

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 laborers who powered the seasonal, extractive economy of the Pacific Northwest....

The Forging of a Black Community

Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era

By Quintard Taylor. Forewords by Quin'Nita Cobbins-Modica and Norman Rice. Afterword by Albert S. Broussard

Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber. He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere, but as Seattle...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West, 1887-1920

By Kazuhiro Oharazeki

This compelling study of a previously overlooked vice industry explores the larger structural forces that led to the growth of prostitution in Japan, the Pacific region, and the North American West at the turn of...

Trout Culture

How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West

By Jen Corrinne Brown

From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly...

Henry M. Jackson

A Life in Politics

By Robert G. Kaufman

Henry M. Jackson ranks as one of the great legislators in American history. With a Congressional career spanning the tenure of nine Presidents, Jackson had an enormous impact on the most crucial foreign policy and...

Warren G. Magnuson and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century America

By Shelby Scates

Warren G. Magnuson served as U.S. senator from the state of Washington for six terms. The sheer sweep of his accomplishments is astonishing: authoring the 1964 Civil Rights Act, protecting Puget Sound, saving Boeing for...

Power and Place in the North American West

By Richard White, John M. Findlay

Western historians continue to seek new ways of understanding the particular mixture of physical territory, human actions, outside influences, and unique expectations that has made the North American West what it is today. This collection...

Encounters in Avalanche Country

A History of Survival in the Mountain West, 1820-1920

By Diana L. Di Stefano

Every winter settlers of the U.S. and Canadian Mountain West could expect to lose dozens of lives to deadly avalanches. This constant threat to trappers, miners, railway workers-and their families-forced individuals and communities to develop...

The Great Columbia Plain

A Historical Geography, 1805-1910

By Donald W. Meinig

Dismissed in early years as a wasteland, the rolling open country that covers the interior parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho is today one of the richest farmlands in the nation. This work is the...

The Rising Tide of Color

Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific

By Moon-Ho Jung

The Rising Tide of Color challenges familiar narratives of race in American history that all too often present the U.S. state as a benevolent force in struggles against white supremacy, especially in the South. Featuring...

The Battle for Butte

Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864–1906

By Michael P. Malone. Foreword by William L. Lang

First published in 1981, The Battle for Butte has remained the best treatment of the influence of copper in the political history of Montana. "Fine history: rich in detail, full of finely drawn people, masterfully...

Parallel Destinies

Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies

By John M. Findlay and Ken S. Coates

The Canadian West and the American Northwest offer a valuable setting for considering issues of borders and borderlands. The regions contain certain similarities, and during the first half of the nineteenth century they were even...

Atomic Frontier Days

Hanford and the American West

By John M. Findlay and Bruce W. Hevly

Outstanding Title by Choice Magazine

On the banks of the Pacific Northwest’s greatest river lies the Hanford nuclear reservation, an industrial site that appears to be at odds with the surrounding vineyards and desert. The 586-square-mile...

The Power of Promises

Rethinking Indian Treaties in the Pacific Northwest

By Alexandra Harmon. Foreword by John Borrows

Treaties with Native American groups in the Pacific Northwest have had profound and long-lasting implications for land ownership, resource access, and political rights in both the United States and Canada. In The Power of Promises,...

The Nature of Borders

Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea

By Lissa K. Wadewitz

Winner of the 2014 Albert Corey Prize from the American Historical Association
Winner of the 2013 Hal Rothman Award from the Western History Association
Winner of the 2013 John Lyman Book Award in the Naval and Maritime...

Shadow Tribe

The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity

By Andrew H. Fisher

Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River Indians -- the defiant River People whose ancestors refused to settle on the reservations established for them in central Oregon and Washington....