Topic: Audio/Video
In this sound recording, renowned Skagit elder Vi Hilbert (1918-2008) correctly pronounces Chief Seattle's name and other common names in Lushootseed, the language of the several Coast Salish peoples....
Chief Seattle, or si?al in his native Lushootseed language, led the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes as the first Euro-American settlers arrived in the greater Seattle area in the 1850s. Baptized Noah by...
Hiram Martin Chittenden (1858-1917) spent most of his working life with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he was involved in the early development of Yellowstone National Park and in navigation,...
The City of Seattle’s civic art collection was founded on monuments to great men, but soon expanded to include symbolic works, works that embraced the modernism of the twentieth century, works t...
Gordon Clinton served as the mayor of Seattle more than a half century ago, but he helped lay the groundwork for the city that exists today. During his eight years in office, Seattle adopted its first...
The Columbia Basin Project (CBP) is the nation's second-largest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation irrigation project. At 670,000 acres under irrigation as of 2021, the project is still unfinished, as more th...
History professor and author, peace activist and humanitarian, Giovanni Costigan taught at the University of Washington for 41 years and was professor emeritus there for 15 more. Passionate about libe...
In 2016, milk was the second highest valued commodity in Washington behind apples, with some 90 percent of the milk produced in the state also processed there. The first substantial herd of cattle arr...
Davenport is the seat of Lincoln County, an agricultural county in northeast Washington's Big Bend region, where dry land wheat farming and cattle ranching are the predominant industries. As of 2009, ...
Davenport Hotel of Spokane opened its doors on September 1, 1914, and was soon acclaimed one of the world's grand hotels. Spokane already had fine hotels, but civic and business leaders, intent on inc...
Ivan Doig spent much of his adult life in the Seattle area but his imagination rarely wandered far from his native Montana. The author of 13 novels and three nonfiction books, including the acclaimed ...
Lawrence Matsuda (b. 1945) is an award-winning poet, author, and educator who in 1969 started the first Asian-American history course in Washington public schools. Matsuda was born in the Japanes...
Bonnie Dunbar, the first woman from Washington state to become an astronaut, rocketed into space five times. Only a handful of other American astronauts have heard the countdown to liftoff from the in...
The Duwamish-Green Watershed in King County comprises 492 square miles of forests, meadows, hills, and valleys that have been shaped by environmental forces and generations of human activities. The wa...
Polly Dyer was a Seattle conservationist and environmentalist. Her dedication to safeguarding Washington's Olympic coastline and forests and to protecting wilderness areas across the state had a profo...
Joni Earl (b. 1953) was the executive director and CEO of Sound Transit from 2001 to 2016, responsible for rescuing Puget Sound's massive rapid transit agency from disaster. When she joined Sound Tran...
For nearly 30 years following Washington statehood, egg farming was a cottage industry comprised of small, family-owned operations tending to small flocks of chickens. That changed in 1915, when enter...
A retired municipal bond lawyer, James R. Ellis never held public office, never headed a major corporation, and was never rich. Yet, as a citizen activist for more than half a century, he left a bigge...
A lawyer by trade, Jim Ellis (1921-2019) was a civic activist who helped transform Seattle into one of America's great cities. One of his contemporaries was Emmett Watson (1918-2001), a Seattle newspa...
Ethiopians and Eritreans have lived in the Seattle area since the late 1960s, beginning with university students. From 1980 with the passage of the Refugee Act until about 2000, thousands of Ethiopian...
Dan and Nancy Evans devoted more than half a century to public service, in and out of political office, with a level of commitment matched by few of their fellow citizens. As a three-term governor of ...
The Everett Massacre of Sunday, November 5, 1916, has been called the bloodiest labor confrontation in Northwest history. On that day a group of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as Wo...
Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer, a rising star in the 1930s, is remembered today more for her unfortunate life story than for her once promising career. Talented and beautiful, Farmer was also wil...
Commercial farming in the Skagit Valley began in earnest in the 1880s after much of the Skagit River's floodplain was walled off behind dikes, converting a maze of marshes, streams, and open channels ...