Putting archive and contemporary photographs of the same landmark side-by-side, Seattle Then and Now® charts the city's spectacular rise from a small lumber town to a booming international business centerSeattle's growth from a small lumber town to one of the world's most influential urban centers has been spectacular. Little more than a century ago, the city was made up of dirt roads and timber buildings. The arrival of the Great Northern Railroad in 1893 and the start of the Klondike gold rush in 1897 changed all that. By 1914, just 25 years after the city suffered a devastating fire that burned the central business district to cinders, Seattle would have been almost unrecognizable to its early inhabitants. Streets had been raised, canals had been dug, and hills had been leveled, with the spoils going to create land out of the Elliott Bay mudflats. And the Smith Tower—the tallest building west of the Mississippi at the time—stood as a symbol of Seattle's new economic confidence. Businesses in Seattle are still booming today, but they are now less dependent on location and more on inspiration. One can see the city as it looked when Denny Hill still rose above downtown, when the University of Washington occupied a mere city block, when Duwamish canoes still put in at Ballast Island, and when missiles were based in Magnolia and naval aircraft at Sand Point. Sites include Hooverville Docks, Elliott Bay, Front Street, Westlake Boulevard, Boeing, Union Station, Ferry Kalakala, Smith Tower, Pioneer Square, Madison Street, Fremont Bridge, and the Rainier Brewery.
Despite the often astonishing changes in the landscape, authors Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard searched high and low, determined to find the same locations and angles as their predecessors. The result is a portrait that reflects not only the amazing changes brought on by time, but also a record of what has remained in this most scenic western state.
Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.
Winner of the 2008 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native. On the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Indians were central to town life. Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation, even as they were made scapegoats for urban disorder. As late as 1880, Seattle was still very much a Native place. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, however, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were transformed as the town turned into a metropolis. Massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected indigenous people's abilities to survive in traditional places. The movement of Native people and their material culture to Seattle from all across the region inspired new identities both for the migrants and for the city itself. As boosters, historians, and pioneers tried to explain Seattle's historical trajectory, they told stories about Indians: as hostile enemies, as exotic Others, and as noble symbols of a vanished wilderness. But by the beginning of World War II, a new multitribal urban Native community had begun to take shape in Seattle, even as it was overshadowed by the city's appropriation of Indian images to understand and sell itself. After World War II, more changes in the city, combined with the agency of Native people, led to a new visibility and authority for Indians in Seattle. The descendants of Seattle's indigenous peoples capitalized on broader historical revisionism to claim new authority over urban places and narratives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native people have returned to the center of civic life, not as contrived symbols of a whitewashed past but on their own terms. In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region. Replaced by ISBN 9780295741345
Nathan Vass has been driving a Seattle city bus at night for the last decade. He began writing a popular blog, The View from Nathan's Bus, about his encounters with the riders of the No. 7 bus, which cuts through the heart of the city's Rainier Valley, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse zip codes in the US. Nathan's blog entries grew into this book. His stories and photography illuminate an overlooked part of urban life and highlight the simple connections people make on a daily basis. His depictions of interactions on the city bus range from heartbreaking to hilarious to inspiring.
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. With his trademark combination of deep local knowledge, precision, and wit, Murray Morgan traces the city’s history from its earliest days as a hacked-from-the-wilderness timber town, touching on local tribes, settlers, the lumber and railroad industries, the great fire of 1889, the Alaska gold rush, flourishing dens of vice, the 1919 general strike, the 1962 World’s Fair, and the stuttering growth of the 1970s and ’80s. Through it all, Morgan shows us that Seattle’s one constant is change and that its penchant for reinvention has always been fueled by creative, if sometimes unorthodox, residents. With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Mary Ann Gwinn, this redesigned edition of Murray Morgan’s classic work is a must for those interested in how Seattle got to where it is today.
Restores the river to its central place in the city’s history With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Chief Se’alth and his allies fished and lived in villages here and white settlers established their first settlements nearby. Industrialists later straightened the river’s natural turns and built factories on its banks, floating in raw materials and shipping out airplane parts, cement, and steel. Unfortunately, the very utility of the river has been its undoing, as decades of dumping led to the river being declared a Superfund cleanup site. Using previously unpublished accounts by Indigenous people and settlers, BJ Cummings’s compelling narrative restores the Duwamish River to its central place in Seattle and Pacific Northwest history. Writing from the perspective of environmental justice—and herself a key figure in river restoration efforts—Cummings vividly portrays the people and conflicts that shaped the region’s culture and natural environment. She conducted research with members of the Duwamish Tribe, with whom she has long worked as an advocate. Cummings shares the river’s story as a call for action in aligning decisions about the river and its future with values of collaboration, respect, and justice.
Instagram sensation Seattle Walk Report uses her distinctive comic style and eagle eye to illustrate the charming and quirky people, places, and things that define Seattle's neighborhoods. Leveraging the growing popularity of Seattle Walk Report on Instagram, this charming book features comic book-style illustrations that celebrate the distinctive and odd people, places, and things that define Seattle's neighborhoods. The book goes deep into the urban jungle, exploring 24 popular Seattle neighborhoods, pulling out history, notable landmarks, and curiosities that make each area so distinctive. Entirely hand-drawn and lettered, Seattle Walk Report will be peppered with fun, slightly interactive elements throughout which make for an engaging armchair read, in addition to a fun way to explore the city's iconic, diverse, hipster, historic, and grand neighborhoods.
"Sentimental, heartfelt….the exploration of Henry’s changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages...A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don’t repeat those injustices."-- Kirkus Reviews “A tender and satisfying novel set in a time and a place lost forever, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet gives us a glimpse of the damage that is caused by war--not the sweeping damage of the battlefield, but the cold, cruel damage to the hearts and humanity of individual people. Especially relevant in today's world, this is a beautifully written book that will make you think. And, more importantly, it will make you feel." -- Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain “Jamie Ford's first novel explores the age-old conflicts between father and son, the beauty and sadness of what happened to Japanese Americans in the Seattle area during World War II, and the depths and longing of deep-heart love. An impressive, bitter, and sweet debut.” -- Lisa See, bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol. This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept. Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago. Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart. BONUS: This edition contains a Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet discussion guide and an excerpt from Jamie Ford's Love and Other Consolation Prizes.
Celebrating America's favorite cityscapes, this series combines historic interest and contemporary beauty. Then and Now features fascinating archival photographs contrasted with specially commissioned, full-color images of the same scene today. A visual lesson in the historic changes of our greatest urban landscapes.
