Topic: Government & Politics
George Fletcher Cotterill served Seattle and the state of Washington for more than 40 years as a civil servant and elected official. He advocated woman suffrage, parks, port districts, Prohibition, an...
Establishing a water system for the residents of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island was a topic of discussion as soon as the town was incorporated in 1909, but it took five years to complete a system. S...
On August 5, 1968, Washington Governor Dan Evans delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida. Evans, then 42 and a relative newcomer to national politic...
Daniel J. Evans (1925-2024) served three terms as governor of Washington, as a United States senator, and as president of The Evergreen State College. He and his wife Nancy Evans (1933-2024) were acti...
As a political species, the Republican environmentalist has become as endangered as the spotted owl. Washington state still has, however, one of the country’s greatest conservation advocates in ...
Health care reformer, public transportation advocate, politician, civil servant, businessman, inventor, environmentalist -- Aubrey Davis affected the lives of Northwesterners for more than half-a-cent...
William Scott Day served as a Democrat in both houses of the Washington State Legislature during a durable 22-year political career. He was born in Rockford, Illinois, but before his first birthday th...
James de Mattos served seven non-consecutive terms as mayor of Bellingham (and its predecessors, Whatcom and New Whatcom) during the community's formative years in the late nineteenth and early twenti...
Nearly 50 years have passed since U.S. District Court Judge George Boldt handed down his historic ruling affirming Native American fishing rights. In this originl essay written for National History Da...
William F. Devin (1898-1982) served as Seattle's mayor for a decade, from June 1, 1942, until June 1, 1952. These were consequential years in the city's history, and he was a consequential leader. Ear...
Emma Smith DeVoe was a major figure in the American woman suffrage movement and a Republican Party activist. Although she spent the bulk of her political life in Washington state, she was also a paid...
As a longtime U.S. Representative, Norm Dicks (b. 1940) spent his career in Congress representing the same blue-collar, working-class district in which he was born and raised. A native of Bremerton, D...
John Francis Dore served as Mayor of Seattle twice during the Great Depression. He entered office a staunch advocate of fiscal economy (budget cuts), but he lost reelection after he alienated the unem...
William O. Douglas, who grew up in Yakima, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court at the age of 40 and served for more than 36 years, longer than any other justice in the Court's history. Bo...
Oregon suffragist Abigail Jane Scott Duniway was a nationally known pioneer leader for women's suffrage who worked regionally in what became the states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Born on an Ill...
Ron Dunlap served three terms as a Washington State Representative and 10 months as King County Executive, appointed to fill the term of the county's first Executive, John D. Spellman (1926-2018), who...
Jennifer Dunn was the first woman to serve as Washington State Republican Party chair and went on to serve six terms as a U.S. Representative from the 8th Congressional District in east King County, i...
Martin J. Durkan was a Seattle-area lawyer, Democratic legislator, and lobbyist. He wielded considerable power during 16 years in the state Senate, where he served as chairman of the Ways and Means Co...
Myrtle Edwards served on the Seattle City Council from 1955 to 1969, and in March 1969 became president of the council. She carried out her work in public life within the League of Women Voters, the G...
John D. Ehrlichman was a former Seattle land use lawyer who experienced both a meteoric rise and a dramatic fall from grace as a result of his loyalty to President Richard M. Nixon. He was rewarded fo...
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...
Jesse Epstein was the primary force behind the creation of the Seattle Housing Authority and was just 29 years old when he was appointed its first director in 1939. He was working for the University o...
This eulogy for Jim Ellis (1921-2019) was given by fomer Washington Governor Gary Locke (b. 1950) on December 8, 2019 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. Ellis was a giant in the cre...
This eulogy for A. Ludlow "Lud" Kramer (1932-2004) was given by Ralph Munro at Lud Kramer's memorial service at St. John's Cathedral in Spokane on April 16, 2004. Lud Kramer became the youngest Secret...