Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - Pacific Northwest (OR, WA)

In 1849 James Swan turned his back on his wife and two children, a prosperous ship-fitting business, and the polite and predictable world of commerce in Boston and fled to the newly opened gold fields in California. Soon sick of the bonanza society, he emigrated to a shallow harbor called Shoalwater Bay (now Willapa Bay) north of the Columbia River in Washington Territory.

Swan eagerly became a part of the frontier community, enjoying the company of both the white settlers and friendly Indians in the area. First published in 1857, his classic account of the western frontier remains...

On the event of its publication in 1965, Murray Morgan wrote, The Dry Years, which might be subtitled 'The Fall and Rise of John Barleycorn, ' is a delightful blend of scholarship, narrative exposition and wit. ...Clark is knowing and acid about alcohol as a class problem. he points out that the drys were usually led by upperclass types whose peers would derive benefit by better habits in the working class. He does not, however, fall into the trap of attributing the attitudes of the reformers to hypocrisy. The drys were awash with sincerity. ...It is one of the many merits of this...

On November 11, 1919, the citizens of Centralia, Washington, gathered to watch former servicemen, local Boy Scouts, and other community groups march in the Armstice Day parade. When the marchers swung past the meeting hall of the Industrial Workers of the World, a group of veterans broke ranks, charged the hall, and were met by gunshots. Before the day was over, four of the marchers were dead and one of the Wobblies had been lynched by the mob.

Through a wealth of newly available primary source material including previously sealed court documents, FBI records released under the...

On a hot summer night in 1963, a teenager named Walt Crowley hopped off a bus in Seattle's University District, and began his own personal journey through the 1960s. Four years later at age 19, he was installed as "rapidograph in residence" at the Helix, the region's leading underground newspaper. His cartoons, cover art, and political essays helped define his generation's experience during that tumultuous decade.

Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle weaves Crowley's personal experience with the strands of international, intellectual, and political history that...

This new edition of the late Victor Steinbrueck's classic book celebrates the 25th anniversary of the passage of Seattle's Pike Place Market Initiative, which saved the market from the urban renewal wrecking ball.

Landscapes of Promise is the first comprehensive environmental history of the early years of a state that has long been associated with environmental protection. Covering the period from early human habitation to the end of World War II, William Robbins shows that the reality of Oregon's environmental history involves far more than a discussion of timber cutting and land-use planning.

Robbins demonstrates that ecological change is not only a creation of modern industrial society. Native Americans altered their environment in a number of ways, including the planned annual...

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 an incubator for trends that characterize the city today.

In 1852, a group of settlers who had spent the winter on Alki Beach relocated to the east side of Elliott Bay and chose the only flat area along the shoreline for the first settlement in downtown Seattle, Pioneer Square. Called Djicjila'letc, "little crossing over place,"...

This riveting work of social history documents the role the news media played in spurring two murders revolving around Edmund Creffield, a charismatic "Holy Roller" evangelist who arrived in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1903 and quickly enraged the citizenry by defiantly challenging the religious and sexual mores of the time. When ardent female followers began refusing to speak to their nonbelieving husbands, vigilantes tarred and feathered Creffield, eventually forcing him to flee to Seattle.

Once there, Creffield was murdered by George Mitchell, the brother of one of his followers. The...

Blessed with vast expanses of virgin timber, a good harbor, and a San Francisco market for its lumber, the Coos Bay area once dubbed itself "a poor man's paradise." A new Prologue and Epilogue by the author bring this story of gyppo loggers, longshoremen, millwrights, and whistle punks into the twenty-first century, describing Coos Bay's transition from timber town to a retirement and tourist community, where the site of a former Weyerhaeuser complex is now home to the Coquille Indian Tribe's The Mill Casino.

A land of mountains, forests, wetlands, lakes, and rivers, the Klamath Basin spans the Oregon-California state line. Farms and ranches, logging towns, and back-to-the-land communities are scattered over this 10-million-acre bioregion. There are Indian reservations at the headwaters, at the estuary, and across the major tributary of the Klamath River. In this place that has witnessed, ever since the Gold Rush, a succession of wars and resource conflicts, myths of the West loom large, amplifying differences among its inhabitants.

At the core of the contemporary controversy is...

In Plowed Under, Andrew P. Duffin traces the transformation of the Palouse region of Washington and Idaho from land thought unusable and unproductive to a wealth-generating agricultural paradise, weighing the consequences of what this progress has wrought. During the twentieth century, the Palouse became synonymous with wheat, and the landscape was irrevocably altered. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, native vegetation is almost nonexistent, stream water is so dirty that it is often unfit for even livestock, and 94 percent of all land has been converted to...