Topic: Society
On November 3, 1970, Washington voters approved Referendum 20, which legalized abortion in the early months of pregnancy. Fifteen other states had liberalized their abortion laws by that time, but Was...
Gary Ewing (1942-2000) died on October 5, 2000, one week past his 58th birthday. This extraordinary, courageous, funny man was a passionate champion of working people and a loyal friend of many. Gary ...
The Beacon Hill Branch, The Seattle Public Library, is located on Seattle's Beacon Hill at 2821 Beacon Avenue S in a building financed by the 1998 "Libraries for All" bond issue. The branch opened in ...
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was formally established in the summer of 1999. The new organization consolidated previous activities dating back to 1994, including family giving, the William ...
Seattle's Blue Moon Tavern first opened its doors at 712 NE 45th Street near the University of Washington on or near April 15, 1934. Founded by Hank Reverman (1912-2009), the tavern was an instant hit...
This piece by Bob Tschida, describing how he and his friends "would always have a gunnysack tucked over our belts" as they roamed Tacoma, first appeared in the Tacoma Historical Society's City of Dest...
In 1972, the Seattle School District launched the first phase of what became a decades-long experiment with mandatory busing to integrate its schools. Initially limited to a few thousand middle school...
Bertha Pitts Campbell (1889-1990), an early Seattle civil rights worker, was a founder of the Christian Friends for Racial Equality and an early board member of the Seattle Urban League. This is an ex...
This is an excerpt from a HistoryLink interview by Heather MacIntosh with Dotty DeCoster in April 2000. DeCoster was an outspoken member of the Women's Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s in Seattle....
In the summer of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed George Floyd Jr., a Black civilian, during an arrest attempt. Captured on vi...
Care for the indigent poor, infirm, disabled, and mentally ill has been a controversial subject in Washington since long before statehood was achieved in 1889. Prior to 1854, most mentally ill pe...
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, many in Seattle's Chicano/Latino community felt an acute isolation. The then small community would see a transformation as a result of the Chicano Movement emerg...
In addition to his namesake city, Chief Seattle (178?-1866) is best remembered for a speech given, according to pioneer Dr. Henry Smith, on the occasion of an 1854 visit to Seattle of Isaac Stevens (1...
In early 1907, Anna Herr Clise (1866-1936) called together 23 affluent Seattle women friends to address a health care crisis -- namely the lack of a facility to treat crippled and malnourished childre...
The first Washington state elected official to make national history in a crusade against cigarettes was not Attorney General Christine Gregoire, who brokered a settlement between the tobacco industry...
Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011) wrote this reminiscence about childhood play in Seattle in 1921. The Pfister family homesteaded near Tiger, in Pend Oreille County, before moving to Seattle i...
The first bicycle arrived in Washington Territory in 1879 on a steamer from San Francisco and within a decade, Washington, along with the rest of the nation, went bike-crazy. Innovative developments s...
Dance Marathons (also called Walkathons), an American phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s, were human endurance contests in which couples danced almost non-stop for hundreds of hours (as long as a month...
This reminiscence of social life among young people in Seattle's Green Lake neighborhood during the early 1930s was written by Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011). "Dancing at the Northeast Improvement Cl...
In the later years of the nineteenth century on San Juan Island, social dancing was a primary social and recreational activity. As with many settlements on the frontier, the dances were held in commun...
In this People's History, Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011) recalls her childhood years living in a log cabin in Pend Oreille County. The Pfister family homesteaded near Tiger for about a deca...
Part 1 of this reminiscence was originally published in North Seattle Press. In it Greenlake resident Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011) recalls the exciting occasion when her father first took her salmo...
In this reminiscence, Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011) tells the story of the beautiful doll, Grace, which became hers on the Christmas morning of 1922. She was nearly 6 years old. In 2009 Dorothea Nor...
In this People's History essay, Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011 )remembers her family's move in 1919 to Seattle from the family homestead in Tiger, Washington. Dorothea has lived in Seattle since then....