Topic: Government & Politics
The 14th essay in our Turning Points series for The Seattle Times, written by Walt Crowley, details the creation of the Port of Seattle on September 5, 1911. The election of the first three Port Commi...
When Wes Uhlman became the mayor of Seattle in 1969, an all-powerful City Council (mostly concerned with the interests of the downtown business establishment) dominated municipal politics. By the time...
The United States Coast Survey began charting what was to become Washington Territory in June 1850 when naval assistant Lieutenant Commanding William Pope McArthur (1814-1850) crossed the Columbia Riv...
Jolene Unsoeld's political beginnings date to the early 1970s, when as a self-described citizen meddler she worked on Initiative 276, a successful 1972 ballot measure that required the state to make i...
Three Seattle City Light dams on the Upper Skagit River in the Cascade Mountains today (2000) produce 25 percent of the electrical power consumed in Seattle. (The dams are located in southeast Whatcom...
Clayton Van Lydegraf's career as a revolutionary began when he joined the American Communist Party as teenager in the 1930s. In the 1940s he became the party's second in command in the Pacific Northwe...
Gordon Franklin Vickery served the City of Seattle for 34 years, first as a firefighter, rising to the office of Chief, and then as Superintendent of Seattle City Light. In both offices he exercised s...
He was known as "Mr. Tri-Cities," the "Man from Hanford," the "Godfather of the Tri-Cities," and, occasionally, by less-flattering terms. For more than 60 years, just about everyone at Hanford and in ...
On November 8, 1910, the male voters of Washington state went to the polls, and voted nearly 2-1 to amend the state constitution, extending the right to vote to Washington women. This 1910 article on ...
A condensed edition of this essay was published in The Seattle Times Sunday Opinion Section on October 30, 2005. This version offers a fuller tour of Washington's "tectonic" political shifts and elect...
Monrad Charles "Mon" Wallgren (1891-1961) served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and four years in the U.S. Senate before becoming Washington's 13th governor in 1944. Swept into office...
Pearl Wanamaker was a long-serving Superintendent of Public Instruction (1941-1957), whose years in the non-partisan office addressed World War II educational and vocational demands, and managed the b...
Charles "Wappy" Wappenstein was a colorful character who was twice Seattle's chief of police (from 1906-1907 and from 1910-1911) and served as a member of the Seattle police force for a much longer pe...
"A Pioneer of Three States -- Adventurer, Prospector, Miner, Trader, Explorer, Promoter, Soldier and Public Official," was how Edward Warbass was once described ("San Juan's Best Known Pioneer"). He c...
The Washington State Arts Commission (ArtsWA) began as a small committee of visual and performing arts experts in the early 1960s. Through the establishment of its "art in public places" program in 19...
The Washington State Grange was founded on September 10, 1889, at the Pioneer Store in La Camas (now Camas), Clark County, spurred in part by objections to the proposed state constitution that had jus...
The Washington State Library was established by the organic act which created Washington Territory in 1853, and it has served as the official library for state government since Washington gained state...
On May 24, 2002, Walt Crowley delivered the following historical "primer" on Washington state politics to the Western States Caucus of the Democratic National Committee held in Seattle. The talk revie...
Washington's tax system, as in all states, is a contentious arena in which politicians, businesspeople, workers, parents, property owners, and educators wrestle over their share of taxes. Washington h...
Soon after the creation of Oregon Territory in 1848, settlers north of the Columbia River began demanding a territory of their own. Congress acquiesced on February 8, 1853, with the creation of Washin...
The Duwamish River, located in King County, has borne the burden of municipal and regional development over the past century. Its channel straightened and dredged, tributaries rerouted, and floodwater...
Along with every other major West Coast port, Seattle's harbor was paralyzed from May 9 to July 31, 1934, by one of the most important and bitter labor strikes of the twentieth century. The struggle p...
Jim West was a Washington State Senate majority leader, a Washington State Senate minority leader, and served as mayor of Spokane from 2003 to 2005. At age 28 he became the youngest person ever electe...
Since the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of non-Indian settlers in the White River Valley (also known as the Green River Valley), the White and Green rivers have undergone many changes. Annual floods ...