Seattle, Past to Present
Seattle, Past to Present

Author: Roger Sale

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780295956152

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Seattle, Past to Present, interprets the history of the foremost city in the Northwest and traces the implications of that history for the city's present and future. In the process Seattle emerges not as a rough, half-formed frontier town but as a soft city of streets and houses, middle-class in aspiration and achievement; Roger Sale asks how it came to be that way. The methods Sale employs range from demographic analysis and residential survey to portraiture and personal observation and reflection. He highlights what was most important in each of the city's major periods from the founding, when the settlers, in waiting forty years for the railroads to come, meanwhile built a city to which the railroads had to come, down to the post-Boeing Seattle of the 1970's, when the city tried for the first time to discover a sense of itself based on the truths and lessons of its own past. Along the way one finds a good deal that has been obscured or ignored in other books on Seattle and in most books on the history of American cities: a discussion of the economic diversity of late-nineteenth-century Seattle which allowed it to grow; a description of the major achievements of the first boom years, in parks, boulevards, and neighborhoods of quiet eleganced; portraits of people like Vernon Parrington, Nellie Cornish, and Mark Tobey who came to Seattle and flourished here; an assessment of Seattle's new vitality as the result of natives and newcomers mixing both in harmony and in antagonism.

The City Is More Than Human
The City Is More Than Human

Author: Frederick L. Brown

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2016-10-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0295999357

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Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites’ relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis. Throughout Seattle’s history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.

Seattle, Past to Present
Seattle, Past to Present

Author: Roger Sale

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2019-10-31

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0295746386

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Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present has become a beloved reflection of Seattle’s history and its possible futures as imagined in 1976, when the book was first published. Drawing on demographic analysis, residential surveys, portraiture, and personal observation and reflection, Sale provides his take on what was most important in each of Seattle’s main periods, from the city’s founding, when settlers built a city great enough that the railroads eventually had to come; down to the post-Boeing Seattle of the 1970s, when the city was coming to terms with itself based on lessons from its past. Along the way, Sale touches on the economic diversity of late nineteenth-century Seattle that allowed it to grow; describes the major achievements of the first boom years in parks, boulevards, and neighborhoods of quiet elegance; and draws portraits of people like Vernon Parrington, Nellie Cornish, and Mark Tobey, who came to Seattle and flourished. The result is a powerful assessment of Seattle’s vitality, the result of old-timers and newcomers mixing both in harmony and in antagonism. With a new introduction by Seattle journalist Knute Berger, this edition invites today's readers to revisit Sale’s time capsule of Seattle—and perhaps learn something unexpected about this ever-changing city.