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A Fever in Salem: A New Interpretation of the New England Witch Trials
Laurie Carlson ('04 Ph.D. History)
This new interpretation of the New England witch trials offers an innovative, well-grounded explanation of witchcraft's link to organic illness. While most historians have concentrated on the accused, Laurie Winn Carlson focuses on the afflicted. Systematically comparing the symptoms recorded in colonial diaries and court records to those of the encephalitis epidemic in the early 20th century, she argues convincingly that the victims suffered from the same disease.
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Adapting in Eden: Oregon's Catholic Minority, 1838-1986
By Patricia Brandt, Lillian A. Pereyra
In the mid-19th century, Catholic priests played key roles in Indian affairs, colonization, and regional development in the Old Oregon Country. During the following decades, Catholics continued to take a lead in creating social, health, and educational services for the region’s rapidly expanding population. However, anti-Catholicism was an often subtle, and sometimes overt, part of the overall Pacific Northwest scene from frontier times until the Great Depression and World War II. Consequently, for many years the relationships within Oregon’s Catholic minority—among its episcopal leaders, priests, and laity—were necessarily tight-knit and cohesive.
By focusing on the personalities and administrative styles of Oregon’s archbishops over time, the authors have delineated this important part of the Northwest tapestry. Adapting in Eden is the first extensive history of Oregon Catholics to appear since 1939.
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Bunion Derby: The 1928 Footrace Across America
By Charles B. Kastner '81
From the publisher:
On March 4, 1928, 199 men lined up in Los Angeles, California, to participate in a 3,400-mile transcontinental footrace to New York City. The Bunion Derby, as the press dubbed the event, was the brainchild of sports promoter Charles C. Pyle. He promised a $25,000 grand prize and claimed the competition would immortalize U.S. Highway Route 66, a 2,400-mile road, mostly unpaved, that subjected the runners to mountains, deserts, mud, and sandstorms, from Los Angeles to Chicago.
The runners represented all walks of American life from immigrants to millionaires, with a peppering of star international athletes included by Pyle for publicity purposes. For eighty-four days, the men participated in this part footrace and part Hollywood production that incorporated a road show featuring football legend Red Grange, food concessions, vaudeville acts, sideshows, a portable radio station, and the world's largest coffeepot sponsored by Maxwell House serving ninety gallons of coffee a day.
Drawn by hopes for a better future and dreams of fame, fortune, and glory, the bunioneers embarked on an exhaustive and grueling journey that would challenge their physical and psychological endurance to the fullest while Pyle struggled to keep his cross-country road show afloat.
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Cattle: An Informal Social History
By Laurie Winn Carlson ('04 Ph.D. History)
From the publisher: The centuries-old relationship of cows to human beings is a fascinating and complex story. It includes extremes of worship and exploitation, and in between some of the most remarkable contributions of animals to civilization. In Cattle, Laurie Winn Carlson takes an historical view of these noble and gentle beasts. In sharply drawn episodes, she shows how cattle have been a vital resource but long ignored and often neglected.
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Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest
By Linda Carlson '73
Carlson provides much insight into the rewards and trials of life in the small, isolated communities of a bygone Northwest. She paints a detailed picture of company town life in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, augmenting her narrative with a generous selection of photographs.
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Domesticating the West: The Re-creation of the Nineteenth-Century American Middle Class
By Brenda K. Jackson '02
In 1881 Thomas and Elizabeth Tannatt said a final goodbye to Massachusetts and the eastern seaboard and set out in search not of land but of opportunities for social and political advancement. Facing severe limitations to their goals in the depressed and disheveled post-war East, the Tannatts went west to Walla Walla, Washington Territory, to pursue their dreams of influence and status.
Domesticating the West examines the motivations of late-nineteenth-century middle-class migrants who moved west to build communities and establish themselves as leaders. The West offered new opportunities for solidly middle-class eastern families who endured hardship, uncertainty, and displacement during the Civil War, and who struggled to carve out meaningful social space in the war’s aftermath. Brenda K. Jackson places the Tannatts at the center of this movement and demonstrates how gender, class, and place affected the new migrants’ abilities to integrate into their new communities. She also shows how easterners redefined themselves as leaders of a new, moral western environment through volunteerism and political participation. While many studies of western expansion focus exclusively on the earliest pioneers, Jackson adroitly shows how later arrivals shaped the social, economic, and cultural growth of the nation.
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During the War Women Went To Work
Produced by Karl Schmidt '81
"This is the story—largely unsung, nearly forgotten—of Washington women who set rivets, flew military aircraft, sold war bonds, survived Nazi capture, and helped liberate the living skeletons at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
"Told against a backdrop of personal scrapbook photos and wartime film footage, they recount not only the 'history book'events but the heartbeat of daily life—playing pranks, falling in love, battling loneliness, and leaving home for the first time."
—Cecilia Goodnow, Seattle Post Intelligencer
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Dynamics of Change: A History of the Washington State Library
By Maryan E. Reynolds with Joel Davis
The Dynamics of Change is an original and valuable history of the Washington State Library from its territorial beginnings in 1853 to the late 1990s. Reynolds provides a personal account of the library’s expansion since the 1940s, when she joined the staff. She chronicles the development of this important state public service and describes how the library facilitated the effective operation of state government. She recounts the efforts to develop a public library statewide that also serves people outside the mainstream.
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Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
By Jared Diamond
Recommended by Karen Lupo, archaeologist. A good read for people interested in larger, big-picture type questions. Very entertaining!
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Harvest Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World and Agricultural Laborers in the American West, 1905-1930
By Greg Hall '94, '99
Examines the role of migratory farm workers in the newly industrializing agriculture of the early 20th century and explains the social and cultural history of their efforts to organize into an industrial union. The book describes, among other places in the West, agricultural labor on the Palouse.
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Hawai'i's Russian Adventure: A New Look at Old History
By Peter R. Mills '87
In an original look at a significant chapter in the history of Hawaii, Mills explores the history of Fort Elisabeth on Kaua’i. His work overturns many popular myths and perceptions about the fort and about European and Hawaiian interaction in the first half of the 19th century, while delving into some of the central issues in historical anthropology, colonialism, and the development of global networks.
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Idaho's Bunker Hill: The Rise and Fall of a Great Mining Company, 1885-1981
By Katherine G. Aiken ('80 Ph.D. Hist.)
From the publisher: “For nearly a century, the Bunker Hill Company was one of the premier mining and smelting corporations in the United States. Located in Kellogg, Idaho, . . . Bunker Hill played a key role in the nation’s industrial development. But at the same time it was the catalyst for unprecedented labor strife and environmental desecration. And today it is one of the EPA’s largest Superfund sites. In this history, Katherine G. Aiken traces Bunker Hill’s evolution from the discovery of the mine in 1885 to the company’s closure in 1981.”
“Throughout the company's long history, Bunker Hill management was relentless in its pursuit of profit. This aggressive capitalism led to rapid expansion, technological innovation, and secure wages for employees. But success came at a price. Each time managers sought production increases, workers became restless and dissatisfied. The resulting labor-management conflicts were nothing short of legendary.”
Following closure of Bunker Hill, the company records were placed in the University of Idaho Library Special Collections. Rarely has such a complete corporate record been available for research. Taking full advantage of this resource, Aiken offers an in-depth profile that illustrates major trends in American corporate culture.
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In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, 1938-1961
By Edward Bliss, Jr.
From the publisher: Edward R. Murrow was America's greatest broadcaster. In Search of Light is both Murrow's permanent testament and a vivid public diary of a tumultuous era. It includes his reports from the rooftops of wartime London, an American troopship in the Atlantic, a bomb run to Berlin, the gates of Buchenwald, the wedding of Queen Elizabeth, the Korean War, the civil rights revolution, the launches of the first rocket probes; his portraits of the great (Churchill, Eisenhower, Stevenson) and the lesser-known but equally heroic; his famous See It Now telecast that helped bring about McCarthy's downfall. These graceful, witty, and courageous broadcasts have set the standard for every journalist in the past half-century.
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Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West
By Mark Fiege '85
This gem of a book is actually about the gem state: Idaho—specifically, the Snake River Plain of southern Idaho, where farmers, engineers, lawyers, bankers, and politicians have carved an agricultural landscape out of the parched and dusty sagebrush desert. With deft prose and engaging anecdotes author Mark Fiege systematically traces the 100-year history of the creation and maintenance of the irrigation infrastructure that made farming possible in the Snake River plain.
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Lewis & Clark Lexicon of Discovery
By Alan H. Hartley
Alan H. Hartley hopes to help modern readers better understand the language of two centuries ago. The result of five years of research on the history, people, and physical world of the expedition, Lewis and Clark Lexicon of Discovery features over 1,100 entries and more than 2,000 illustrative quotations, as well as considerable background material on the English (and other languages) of the expedition. With a special emphasis on pronunciation, the volume will be exceptionally valuable to historical re-enactors.
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Lewis and Clark Trail Maps: A Cartographic Reconstruction, Vol. 1
By Martin Plamondon II
By using measurements and notes in William Clark’s journals, Plamondon has created maps depicting the Corps’ route on the Missouri River from Illinois to North Dakota. The maps compare the modern beds of streams to their courses at the time of exploration. Of further interest are excerpts from the expedition diaries and an insightful essay on frontier surveying.
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Lewis and Clark Trail Maps: A Cartographic Reconstruction, Vol. 2
By Martin Plamondon II
Beginning a short distance above Fort Mandan, 180 maps depict the explorers’ route in 1805–6 on the Missouri River in North Dakota and Montana, over the continental divide to Idaho, and on westward-flowing waters to the Snake-Columbia confluence in central Washington. As in Volume I, the maps contrast modern riverbeds to their courses at the time of exploration.
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Lewis and Clark Trail Maps: A Cartographic Reconstruction, Vol. 3
By Martin Plamondon II
Presenting key geographic and historic features, and comparing modern beds of streams to their courses at the time of the exploration, the final volume of the series continues the cartographic reconstruction of the explorers' trek as they set out from the Snake-Columbia junction, October 18, 1805, on the final leg of their journey to the sea. It concludes when the Corps of Discovery, long given up for dead by most Americans, paddled up to the St. Louis waterfront on September 23, 1806, to a rousing reception by the local population.
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Medieval Islamic Economic Thought: Filling the Great Gap in European Economics
Ed. S.M. Ghazanfar ('62, '64, '69)
This book presents a collection of papers on the origins of economic thought discovered in the writings of Islamic scholars who flourished some five centuries before the Latin Scholastics such as St. Thomas Aquinas. Although this period is known as the “Great Gap” in intellectual history, it was a time of intense intellectual activity in Islamic civilization, including socioeconomic thought. The book is a significant attempt to close this “great gap.”
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Moroland: America's First Attempt to Transform an Islamic Society
By Robert A. Fulton '62
From the publisher: Moroland is the lost history of the once-famed struggle between the United States Army and the "wild" Moros, the Muslims of the southern Philippine Islands. Lasting over two decades, it was this country's first sustained encounter with a volatile mixture of nation-building, insurgency, and militant Islamism.
An unanticipated byproduct of the Spanish-American War, the task of subduing and then "civilizing" the "Land of the Moros" was delegated to the U.S. Army. Working through the traditional ruling hierarchy and respecting an ancient system of laws based on the Qur'an, "Moro province" became an autonomous, military-governed Islamic colony within a much larger, overwhelmingly Christian territory, the Philippine Islands. An initially successful occupation, it transitioned to a grand experiment: an audacious plan to transform and remake Moro society, values, and culture in an American image; placing the Moros on an uncertain and ill-defined path towards eventual Western-style democracy. But the Moros reacted with obstinate and unyielding resistance to what they perceived as a deliberate attack on the religion of islam and a way of life ordained by God. The constant stream of battles and expeditions over the next ten years is known in U.S. Army history as the "Moro Campaigns." In violence and ferocity they may have equaled, if not surpassed, the much more famous late-19th-century Indian Wars of the Great Plains.
Few Americans are aware that a century later the U.S. military has quietly returned to Moroland, to battle "radical Islamist terrorism"; using Army Green Berets, Navy Seals, and other elite forces. It is the smallest of the fronts of the "global war on terror" and the least-covered or critically examined. It leads the reader to an obvious question: are we avoiding or are we repeating our own past?
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Native River: The Columbia Remembered: Priest Rapids to the International Boundary
By William D. Layman
Native River satisfies our curiosity to know what the mighty Columbia River once looked like when it ran wild and free. Featuring a wealth of illustrations, maps, and photographs, many never before published, this finely crafted book focuses on a 350-mile reach of the middle Columbia River—from Priest Rapids in south-central Washington to the U.S.-Canadian border. Layman gives us the unique opportunity of picturing the great river and man's relationship to it prior to the building of seven major dams that now harness the mid-Columbia's power and obscure its former features under reservoirs. The author affords each segment of this waterway its own unique rich visual documentation. This forms a backdrop to compelling river stories, told in a variety of perspectives and voices. Included are Native American legends and lore, the river's many petroglyphs and pictographs, accounts of white explorers and immigrants, and Layman's own insightful observations.
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On Sidesaddles to Heaven: The Women of the Rocky Mountain Mission
Laurie Carlson ('04 Ph.D. History)
Carlson analyzes the lives of the first six white women--missionary wives--to cross the Rocky Mountains. At a time when a woman's entire fortune and future were tied to the man she married, four of the six women married virtual strangers, on short notice, with no financial security. Why did they take such a gamble?
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Palouse Country: A Land and Its People
By Richard Scheuerman; photography by John Clement
Step into the beauty and heritage of the Palouse. Discover the oral histories of the people who populated this area. See panoramic beauty unlike anywhere else in the world. More than 50 John Clement photos will take you there. Author Dick Sheuerman tells a carefully crafted account with words that only one who loves the land can tell it. 1993 edition only.
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Primary Source Collections in the Pacific Northwest: An Historical Researcher's Guide
By Nancy A. Bunker ('83 B.A. Ed./Soc. Stud.)
From the publisher: Nancy Bunker's particular combination of foresight and attention to detail makes her the perfect tour guide for scholars in search of manuscript and photograph collections in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The core of the book contains profiles of 175 institutions, covering a broad cross-section of public libraries, academic libraries, historical societies, museums and governmental agencies. Each profile includes the basics: contact information, directions, URLs and email addresses, costs, accessibility, and subject specialties. In many cases, Bunker actually visited the institution in question; so when she offers recommendations of where to eat lunch, spend the night, or park, she speaks with the voice of experience! In addition, Bunker takes great care to offer invaluable advice about the nature of archival research, what to take with you, and what to expect when you get there.
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Puget's Sound: a Narrative History of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound
By Murray Morgan
The story of Tacoma from Vancouver’s arrival in 1792 to the establishment of Fort Lewis in 1916. Filled with local characters and major events for the state.
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Sacajawea's People: The Lemhi Shoshones and the Salmon River Country
By John W.W. Mann '01
From the publisher: Mann offers a richly detailed look at the life of Sacajawea's people before their first contact with non-Natives and their subsequent confinement to a reservation in Idaho. He describes how for the past century the Lemhis have fought to preserve their political, economic, and cultural integrity. His compelling account should help to restore them to their rightful place in the American story.
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Seduced by the West: Jefferson's America and the Lure of the Land Beyond the Mississippi
By Laurie Winn Carlson ('04 Ph.D. History)
Seduced by the West views the Lewis and Clark expedition as just one of several schemes to seize Western lands from foreign powers and extend the new United States to the Pacific. And behind the scenes in most all of them was the Virginian who actually knew little about the West but under whose presidency the Louisiana Purchase was completed, Thomas Jefferson.
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Soldiers of the Mountain: The Story of the 10th Mountain Division of World War II
By Norma Tadlock Johnson ('49 Home Ec.)
From the publisher: Stories of soldiers who trained on skis and learned to climb jagged peaks as part of their training caught the imagination of a country embroiled in World War II and ready for heroes. The 10th Mountain Division originally consisted of students, ranchers, and mountain men of all types. Each had to have three letters of recommendation in order to be accepted. Written for young people as well as general readers of all ages, Soldiers of the Mountain chronicles the events leading up to and beyond their famous night-time climb of the cliffs of Riva Ridge. There they surprised the Germans and made possible the ensuing conquest of Mt. Belvedere and the rest of Italy. Fighting continued through the Apennines and on to the Po Valley and the base of the Alps before the Germans surrendered. The inspiring, frightening and sometimes even humorous events that occurred shaped the lives of these men forever
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The Cayton Legacy: An African American Family
By Richard S. Hobbs '69, '71
The Cayton Legacy tells of the evolution of a remarkable African American family in Seattle and Chicago. From the Civil War to the present, generations of the Horace and Susie Cayton family helped illuminate the black and white experience in the United States and the troubled course of race relations
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The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805-1910
By D.W. Meinig
A classic first published in 1968 and re-released in 1995.
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The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest
By Alvin M. Josephy
A well-researched history of the years from the time of Lewis and Clark to the defeat of Chief Joseph in the late 1800s.
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The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester
Recommended by Alice Spitzer, librarian. Spitzer loved the improbability of the situation--a man locked away in an insane asylum contributing more than 10,000 definitions and illustrative quotations for the Oxford English Dictionary. The book is well researched, beautifully written, and entertaining.
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The War Years: A Chronicle of Washington State in World War II
By James R. Warren ('49 Speech/Comm.)
Washington State supplied crucial resources during WWII, including millions of tons of food and raw material, thousands of bomber planes, hundreds of ships, and the few pounds of plutonium that ended the war and ushered in the nuclear age. This chronicle of the war years details the state's wartime contributions and sacrifices with a month- by-month diary drawing on newspaper reports, military records, and other sources.
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The Wenatchee Valley and Its First Peoples: Thrilling Grandeur, Unfulfilled Promise
By Richard Scheuerman and John Clement
Oral histories and documentary accounts of the native people of the mid-Columbia, especially the Wenatchi Indians. Copiously illustrations include period ;ithographs and a generous selection of John Clement's inspired photographs.
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Washington Territory
By Robert E. Ficken
An account of the 36 years Washington Territory waited for statehood and the railways to connect its east and west sides.
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William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics
Laurie Carlson ('04 Ph.D. History)
William J. Spillman (1863-1931), considered the founder of agricultural economics, was a scientist and popular agricultural educator for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As the author of more than three hundred articles and four books, Spillman left a lasting mark on American agriculture during the late 19th and early 20th centuries with his pioneering solutions for the problems of overproduction and low prices. By placing Spillman’s story within the larger context of American agricultural history, Carlson takes readers inside the USDA during the years our nation’s agricultural policy took shape. She studies the development of the field of genetics, the conflicts regarding agricultural education and the creation of the Cooperative Extension Service, the overproduction crisis after World War I and Spillman’s ideas for allotment, and the commercial fertilizer industry and the Law of Diminishing Returns.
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Wired for Success: The Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway, 1892-1985
By Charles V. Mutschler ('99 Ph.D.)
This lavishly illustrated story of technology, people, and commerce describes the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railway’s hauling of vast amounts of copper ore from Butte Hill, Montana, westward to smelter operations at Anaconda—a distance of 26 miles. Charles V. Mutschler puts the saga in context, whether discussing the labor violence of the 1890s, the role of steam during America’s Gilded Age, or the expansion of highway competition since the 1920s.
Founded in 1892 and owned by Anaconda Copper, the BA&P led the way in early 20th-century electrified railroading. In 1912, General Electric was contracted to convert the short line’s operations from steam to electric. The BA&P became a proving ground for railroad electrification and the center of attention for electric-power advocates. In particular, the Milwaukee Road—soon to be a leader in main-line electrification—took a very keen interest in the BA&P.
For the first time in book-length treatment, Wired for Success delineates the BA&P’s essential role in the development of electric railroads in the United States.
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World War II on the Air: Edward R. Murrow and the Broadcasts That Riveted a Nation (book and CD)
Book by Mark Bernstein, Alex Lubertozzi; CD narrated by Dan Rather
From the publisher: The story of World War II was told first not by historians, but by reporters. And no one told that story with more impact than Edward R. Murrow and the remarkable band of reporters he assembled. World War II on the Air recounts the dramatic stories behind these extraordinary correspondents. And it lets you hear their actual broadcasts, culled from the archives and collected here—many for the first time—on audio CD, narrated by Dan Rather.
