Seattle is a music town with rich, deep roots that have influenced the culture and identity of its civic life for decades. In a society that appreciates music but is ambivalent toward the profession of making it, the importance and contribution of Seattle's musicians have been routinely overlooked in historical accounts of the city. Kurt Armbruster fills that gap in this far-reaching and entertaining panorama of Seattle music from the 1890s to the 1960s, «before Seattle rocked.»For this once-remote city, music forged links as real as those created by railroads and steamships. Classical music embodied the middle-class aspirations for gentility and cosmopolitan stature; jazz and blues gave Seattle's small African American community a vehicle for affirmation and economic advancement; ethnic music helped immigrants adjust to a new home; songs and drumming kept the memories of the Duwamish alive in a changing world. Before Seattle Rocked is enlivened by personal anecdotes and memories from many of Seattle's most beloved musicians and is enriched by historic photos of the changing music scene.Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyo22tC6PkQ&feature=channel_video_title
When a mining claim on a crumbling cliff of burnt-rose quartzite lured naturalist Jack Nisbet to the northeastern corner of Washington State in 1970, he began a search for an understanding of that open country through stories about the people who lived there and the everyday events he shared with them. Together, these vivid, engaging, and subtly humorous stories evoke the essence of this place.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lwlNisTUyk
2011 Outstanding Title, University Press Books for Public and Secondary School LibrariesWinner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association AwardBefore Forks, a small town on Washington�s Olympic Peninsula, became famous as the location for Stephenie Meyer�s Twilight book series, it was the self-proclaimed �Logging Capital of the World� and ground zero in a regional conflict over the fate of old-growth forests. Since Pulitzer Prize�winning journalist William Dietrich first published The Final Forest in 1992, logging in Forks has given way to tourism, but even with its new fame, Forks is still a home to loggers and others who make their living from the surrounding forests. The new edition recounts how forest policy and practices have changed since the early 1990s and also tells us what has happened in Forks and where the actors who were so important to the timber wars are now.For more information on the author to to: http://williamdietrich.com/
Outstanding Title by Choice MagazineOn 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 compound on the Columbia River is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years of waste from manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hanford routinely makes the news, as scientists, litigants, administrators, and politicians argue over its past and its future.It is easy to think about Hanford as an expression of federal power, a place apart from humanity and nature, but that view distorts its history. Atomic Frontier Days looks through a wider lens, telling a complex story of production, community building, politics, and environmental sensibilities. In brilliantly structured parallel stories, the authors bridge the divisions that accompany Hanford�s headlines and offer perspective on today�s controversies. Influenced as much by regional culture, economics, and politics as by war, diplomacy, and environmentalism, Hanford and the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick illuminate the history of the modern American West.
Since its beginnings, Open Spaces has been on the cutting edge of thinking about the Pacific Northwest – an intelligent, provocative, beautifully conceived magazine for thoughtful readers who are searching for new ways to understand the region, themselves, and many of the major issues of our time.The Pacific Northwest is known for its innovative solutions. Whether the challenge is integration with the natural world, the relationship of science and policy, learning to use what we know, or simply enjoying a balanced and fulfilling life, these writers, leaders in their respective disciplines, provide the background necessary to understand the issues and move forward. This lasting collection from the magazine is an invaluable resource for students, educators, and practitioners working in various fields as well as decision makers in government, business, and other sectors looking for real-world answers to ongoing conflicts.Collectively, the writers in this volume apply their expertise and talent to provide an intelligent and informed context through which to see public issues and make sense of the changes that continue to shape the region and our world. Individually, they touch on our deepest sense of human experience and continuity and reflect the spirit of the Northwest. Open Spaces enlightens, challenges, and inspires.Featured writers:Bruce BabbittR. Peter BennerLinda BesantEmory BundyJeff CurtisBob DavisonSandra DorrAngus DuncanDavid James DuncanTom GrantStephen J. HarrisRoy HemmingwayThomas F. HornbeinWilliam KittredgeJane LubchencoKathleen Dean MooreLee C. NeffJames OpieDiarmuid F. O'ScannlainJarold RamseyRichard RapportEric RedmanWilliam D. RuckelshausRobert SackEdward W. SheetsScot SiegelKim StaffordJohn StruloeffAnn WareCharles WilkinsonFor more information go to: http://www.open-spaces.com
Seattle was a very different city in 1960 than it is today. There were no black bus drivers, sales clerks, or bank tellers. Black children rarely attended the same schools as white children. And few black people lived outside of the Central District. In 1960, Seattle was effectively a segregated town.Energized by the national civil rights movement, an interracial group of Seattle residents joined together to form the Seattle chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Operational from 1961 through 1968, CORE had a brief but powerful effect on Seattle. The chapter began by challenging one of the more blatant forms of discrimination in the city, local supermarkets. Located within the black community and dependent on black customers, these supermarkets refused to hire black employees. CORE took the supermarkets to task by organizing hundreds of volunteers into shifts of continuous picketers until stores desegregated their staffs. From this initial effort CORE, in partnership with the NAACP and other groups, launched campaigns to increase employment and housing opportunities for black Seattleites, and to address racial inequalities in Seattle public schools. The members of Seattle CORE were committed to transforming Seattle into a more integrated and just society.Seattle was one of more than one hundred cities to support an active CORE chapter. Seattle in Black and White tells the local, Seattle story about this national movement. Authored by four active members of Seattle CORE, this book not only recounts the actions of Seattle CORE but, through their memories, also captures the emotion and intensity of this pivotal and highly charged time in America�s history.For more information visit: http://seattleinblackandwhite.org/
Winner of the 2012 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental HistoryIn the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam�s most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam�s turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies through the lens of environmental history.Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts centered on the development of a dense network of new canals to open land for agriculture. These projects helped precipitate economic and environmental crises in the 1930s, and subsequent struggles after 1945 led to the balkanization of the delta into a patchwork of regions controlled by the Viet Minh, paramilitary religious sects, and the struggling Franco-Vietnamese government. After 1954, new settlements were built with American funds and equipment in a crash program intended to solve continuing economic and environmental problems. Finally, the American military collapse in Vietnam is revealed as not simply a failure of policy makers but also a failure to understand the historical, political, and environmental complexity of the spaces American troops attempted to occupy and control.By exploring the delta as a quagmire in both natural and political terms, Biggs shows how engineered transformations of the Mekong Delta landscape – channelized rivers, a complex canal system, hydropower development, deforestation – have interacted with equally complex transformations in the geopolitics of the region. Quagmire delves beyond common stereotypes to present an intricate, rich history that shows how closely political and ecological issues are intertwined in the human interactions with the water environment in the Mekong Delta.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1-UItZqsk
The residents of the three northern provinces of Korea have long had cultural and linguistic characteristics that have marked them as distinct from their brethren in the central area near the capital and in the southern provinces. The making and legitimating of centralized Korean nation-states over the centuries, however, have marginalized the northern region and its distinct subjectivities.Contributors to this book address the problem of amnesia regarding this distinct subjectivity of the northern region of Korea in contemporary, historical, and cultural discourses, which have largely been dominated by grand paradigms, such as modernization theory, the positivist perspective, and Marxism. Through the use of storytelling, linguistic analysis, and journal entries from turn-of-the-century missionaries and traveling Russians in addition to many varieties of unconventional primary sources, the authors creatively explore unfamiliar terrain while examining the culture, identity, and regional distinctiveness of the northern region and its people. They investigate how the northern part of the Korean peninsula developed and changed historically from the early Choson to the colonial period and come to a consensus regarding the importance of regionalism as a vital factor in historical transformation, especially in regard to Korea's tumultuous modern era.
Hiking Washington�s History reveals the stories embedded in Washington�s landscape. This trail guide narrates forty historic trails, ranging from short day hikes to three- or four-day backpacking trips over mountain passes. Every region in the state is included, from the northwesternmost tip of the continental United States at Cape Flattery to the remote Blue Mountains in the southeast. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the region�s history followed by individual trail narratives and historical highlights. Quotes from diaries, journals, letters, and reports, as well as contemporary and historic photographs, describe sites and trails from Washington�s past. Each trail description includes a map and provides directions, so hikers can follow the historic route. Judy Bentley tells readers how to get there, what to expect, and what to look for.Despite Washington State�s rapid growth, a remarkable number of historic trails have been preserved in national parks, restored by cities and towns, returned to public use by the railroads, or opened to hikers by Native American tribes. Some trails, such as the Iron Goat Trail, have been fully restored and interpreted. Others, such as the Naches Pass Trail, have been abused but survive. Some are easily accessible, such as the Duwamish River Trail in Seattle and the Spokane House trails near Spokane. Others, such as Chief Joseph�s Summer Trail, require a half-day journey just to reach the trailhead.Hiking Washington�s History is for hikers, amateur historians, newcomers unfamiliar with the state's history, and Northwest natives who know only part of that history. Savor the vicarious experience of a hike from a cozy chair on a rainy winter day, or put your boots on and hit the trail when the sun shines.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aulywhW2mY
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. Largely overlooked in traditional accounts of tribal dispossession and confinement, their story illuminates the persistence of off-reservation Native communities and the fluidity of their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light of federal policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering presence of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes down the difficult path marked out by the forces of American colonization.Based on more than a decade of archival research and conversations with Native people, Andrew Fisher�s groundbreaking book traces the waxing and waning of Columbia River Indian identity from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Fisher explains how, despite policies designed to destroy them, the shared experience of being off the reservation and at odds with recognized tribes forged far-flung river communities into a loose confederation called the Columbia River Tribe. Environmental changes and political pressures eroded their autonomy during the second half of the twentieth century, yet many River People continued to honor a common heritage of ancestral connection to the Columbia, resistance to the reservation system, devotion to cultural traditions, and detachment from the institutions of federal control and tribal governance. At times, their independent and uncompromising attitude has challenged the sovereignty of the recognized tribes, earning Columbia River Indians a reputation as radicals and troublemakers even among their own people.Shadow Tribe is part of a new wave of historical scholarship that shows Native American identities to be socially constructed, layered, and contested rather than fixed, singular, and unchanging. From his vantage point on the Columbia, Fisher has written a pioneering study that uses regional history to broaden our understanding of how Indians thwarted efforts to confine and define their existence within narrow reservation boundaries.