Topic: People's Histories
Sally Bagshaw (b. 1951) served on the Seattle City Council during a period when debate was raging about how to replace the damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct. As Bagshaw relates in these conversations with J...
Valerie Segrest is a nutritionist and food sovereignty advocate. An enrolled member of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, she's also co-founder of Tahoma Peak Solutions, working to organize tribal communit...
Paula Dahl (Jones) was just 6 years old when she became the nine-millionth visitor to Century 21, Seattle's 1962 World's Fair. She and her family were greeted at the gate and given prizes and a red-ca...
Christmas of 1851 found a great change at New York Alki, the place of the very beginning of our city of Seattle. Only six short weeks had passed since the Arthur Denny party had made their historic la...
This essay by Adam C. Eisenberg on Seattle's first female patrol officers hired and trained to be cops on the beat equal to men (nine women hired in 1976), originally appeared in the Seattle Post-Inte...
Former Seattle resident John M. Leggett offers this account of attending Seattle's Loyal Heights Elementary School in the 1930s.
In the winter of 1934, Seattle made national news when its Board of Park Commissioners opened one of the first municipal ski areas in the country at the old Milwaukee Railroad stop of Laconia at Snoqu...
This essay on Seattle's Potlatch, the Ad Club, and Seattle's Potlatch Bug is based on materials found in the library of Seattle's Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI). It was prepared by MOHAI his...
Colleen G. Armstrong of Des Moines, Washington, contributes this account of the death of her brother, Ellensburg High School graduate Second Lieutenant Glenn W. Goodrich, in France in 1944, and how he...
William J. "Bill" Nass (1924-1986) was born to German immigrant parents, Julius and Margaret Nass, and grew up with a love of baseball and near Sicks' Stadium. While attending high school Bill had a p...
This reminiscence by the then-bank teller Dorothea Pfister (later Nordstrand) (1916-2011) recounts the events of a rather alarming day at the Green Lake State Bank, located in the Green Lake neighborh...
This People's History interview of Milan DeRuwe (1917-2006) on the sheep business in Eastern Washington was reprinted from The Pacific Northwesterner, Vol. 45, No. 2 (October 2002), from an issue titl...
William Shelton (1868-1938), cultural leader of the Tulalip Tribes, spent much of his life attempting to bridge the divide between regional Indians and whites through traditional storytelling and art....
In this account, Sally Flood remembers the games at Seattle's Sicks' Stadium in the late 1930s.
William J. "Bill" Nass (1924-1986) grew up with a love of baseball near Seattle's Sicks' Stadium. He wrote this baseball reminiscence in 1981 after the demolition of the stadium. Bill Nass lived in Wa...
The Silver Skis Race on Mount Rainier, held from 1934 to 1942 and in 1947 and 1948, was an iconic Northwest event and one of the country's best-known ski races. Skiers hiked from Paradise Lodge at 5,4...
Louis Chesnut served in the Federal Land Bank system for 35 years, 10 years as vice president. This is his recollection of his involvement in the selection of the Hanford site for the development of t...
During the 1930s, skiing in the northwest grew rapidly. Seattle and Tacoma area enthusiasts traveled to Snoqualmie Pass, Paradise on Mount Rainier, and Mount Baker on weekends to ski. Travel to ski ar...
Martin was a stop on the Northern Pacific (NP) rail line in Kittitas County, at the east portal of the NP tunnel through the Cascade Mountains under Stampede Pass. It was named for nearby Martin Creek...
This is the first of a two-part essay on the early history of skiing in Washington's Cascade Mountains, covering the period from the start of organized skiing in the region through 1937. It is based i...
This is the second of a two-part essay on the early history of skiing in Washington's Cascade Mountains. This People's History was written by John W. Lundin and Stephen J. Lundin, who are both former ...
Slam poetry is a form of competitive performance poetry in which participants offer works no longer than three minutes and are judged by randomly picked audience members. The winners then progress to ...
Schoolteacher Blanche Shannahan, granddaughter of Snohomish County pioneer Robert Smallman, left a written account of life on the Smallman-Shannahan farm located at Tualco near Monroe, a farm owned an...
John James Smith was a medical doctor from West Virginia who came to the Northwest in the late 1800s to work for a mining company. He settled in Enumclaw in 1901, where he carved out a successful care...