Topic: Economics
Gary Graupner grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, but tales of the hardships that his close family endured as they struggled with poverty, disease, war, and the Great Depression were passed down to him in...
Beginning in 1969, the Boeing Company, after a decade of rapid growth in air travel, began laying off employees due to oversaturation of the airplane market. As airplane sales continued to decline, th...
The Columbia River Gorge is a symphony of water and rock, a 90-mile-long passageway sliced through the Cascade Mountains by a river on its way to the sea. The mountains divide the Pacific Northwest in...
No region of Washington was spared the crippling effects of the Great Depression that overshadowed the country in the 1930s, but the residents of San Juan County in Northwest Washington had some advan...
The discovery of gold in California in 1848 sent would-be millionaires on a quest for treasure throughout the West. By 1900, major strikes had been made in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Alaska, and western C...
For 10 years beginning in 1929, most of the world experienced the largest economic depression in history. The Great Depression devastated national economies, threw millions out of work, and contribute...
Hoovervilles, also called shanty towns or shack towns, housed thousands of down-on-their-luck men and women during the 1930s. The name was a sarcastic nod to the unpopular U.S. president Herbert Hoove...
Homelessness was both a local and a national problem prior to America's entry into World War I. Unemployed and homeless men, known variously as hoboes and "ginks," responded to their condition by orga...
On July 17, 1897, the steamship Portland arrived in Seattle from Alaska with 68 miners and a cargo of "more than a ton of solid gold" from the banks of the Klondike River in Canada's Yukon Territory. ...
Municipal ownership or close regulation of essential utilities and urban services was a central tenet of the Progressive Movement from the late 1800s through much of the twentieth century. Beginning w...
Here Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011) remembers her first job, obtained in the Green Lake neighborhood near her Seattle home. She was 17 years old, and the Great Depression was on. In 2009 Do...
This is a list of Nobel Prize winners associated with the state of Washington.
The Northern Pacific Railroad played a pivotal role in the development of railroads in Seattle and in the Puget Sound region. The company's decision to locate its Western terminus in Tacoma rather tha...
In this People's History, Jim Douglas (1909-2005), president of Northgate Centers Inc. from 1949 to 1976, remembers the opening of Northgate Shopping Center on April 21, 1950, the new development's fi...
This file contains Seattle historian and photographer Paul Dorpat's Now & Then photographs and reflections on The Great Depression and Seattle's shantytown of homeless and jobless people called Ho...
Less than four years after Washington Territory achieved statehood, what was known as America's "Gilded Age" came to an agonizing end when the nation was struck by the worst economic crisis it had yet...
In the spring of 1893, a precipitous drop in United States gold reserves triggered a national depression. Because Seattle was still rebuilding from the disastrous fire of 1889 and depended heavily on ...
The Port of Seattle is a public municipal corporation that owns and manages Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the region's largest; a leading container port (since 2015 operated jointly with the P...
Washington has 75 public port districts, more than any other state. Each is an independent government body, run by commissioners elected by local voters. They operate major marine terminals and small ...
Washington's public port districts play a critical role in the state's economy by stimulating business development and job creation that private companies cannot or do not undertake on their own. Run ...
With the Puyallup Land Claims Settlement of 1990, the Puyallup Tribe of Indians was able to resolve many of the conflicts over land ownership between the Tribe and local commercial, private, and gover...
The history of railroading in Seattle closely parallels the city's development and early hopes for its future. Like communication networks today, railroading in the nineteenth century represented more...
Retailing -- the business of selling merchandise to consumers -- took hold in Washington in the 1850s after the territory's first American-owned store opened in Olympia. As cities and towns grew, the ...
The natural harbor of Elliott Bay offered a wealth of resources to the settlers who came to its shores in the 1850s to build Seattle into a city. Its deep waters provided ample space for ships to anch...