Topic: Government & Politics
Catherine May was the first woman elected to Congress from Washington state and one of the few women of her generation to win national office without first being appointed to replace a husband. A cons...
Everett, the Puget Sound port city that is now the county seat and largest city in Snohomish County, incorporated in 1893 and elected Thomas Dwyer as its first mayor that same year. The office of mayo...
Jim McDermott was a titan in Washington state and national politics for nearly 50 years. An Illinois-born doctor who served in the U.S. Navy as a psychiatrist during the Vietnam War, McDermott made hi...
John H. McGraw was elected Washington state's second governor in 1892. He arrived in Seattle from Maine during the 1870s at the age of 26, and got a job as a clerk in the Occidental Hotel. He joined S...
Richard Jeffrey McIver (1941-2013), a Seattle city councilman from 1997 to 2009, was descended from African American settlers who came to the Northwest in the nineteenth century. He was born in Seattl...
Albert Mead served as Washington's fifth governor from 1905 to 1909. A Republican, he was known as an affable straight arrow who took a keen interest in a wide range of issues facing the state, from t...
Edmond Meany was one of the University of Washington's most notable history professors. His passion for state history helped promote the region at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and at the 1909 Alaska-...
Lloyd Meeds was a respected and successful congressman who represented Washington state's 2nd Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives from 1965 to 1979. Previously he had ...
The Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle, commonly known as Metro, was designed to provide regional solutions for the problems of King County's fast-growing metropolitan area. In 1958, after rejecting...
The traditional life of Native Americans on San Juan Island was permanently disrupted in the second half of the nineteenth century by an influx of homesteaders, many of whom, however, chose Native Ame...
Hugh B. Mitchell, a U.S. Senator and Representative known as "Mitch" to friends and colleagues, was a New Deal Democrat who believed government could and should help citizens prosper. He served in Con...
John Mitsules earned the Bronze Star during his Army service in Vietnam, was an influential business leader in Seattle's University District during the turmoil of the 1960s, directed the Seattle Model...
Seattle's monorail is a mile-long railway that travels between Seattle Center and Westlake Center in downtown Seattle. It opened in 1962 as part of the city's Century 21 Exposition, and shuttled visit...
From its founding in 1852, Seattle has been confronted by the scourge of homelessness. The city's first official homeless person was Edward Moore, a Massachusetts-born sailor who, having been rescued ...
Robert Moran arrived in Seattle in 1875 at age 18, alone, with just pennies in his pocket. By 1900, he was one of the city's wealthiest and most-respected businessmen, head of a major shipbuilding com...
Abraham Morris, a Pierce County coal operator and eponym of the coal town Morristown, was born in Wales and moved to the United States with his family at the age of 2. The family arrived in Washigton ...
Harold Gene Moss was the first African American member of both the Tacoma City Council and the Pierce County Council, and Tacoma's first African American mayor. He became active in the civil-rights mo...
Republican John Moyer was a gynecologist/obstetrician from Spokane who served three terms in the Washington State House of Representatives from 1986 to 1992 and one term in the Washington State Senate...
Founded on May 23, 1910, the Municipal League of Seattle (now of King County) quickly became a leading organization in the area's Progressive Movement. In the first decades of the twentieth century it...
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...
Politician and humanitarian Ralph Munro served as Washington Secretary of State from 1980 until 2001. He was instrumental in streamlining voter registration procedures, pressed for the preservation of...
Patty Murray once said, "Throughout my life I've been underestimated. But it's easier to score a goal when they're trying to block everyone else" (Pope & Modie). Murray turned an early insult &mda...
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) is a sweeping federal law often called the Magna Carta of the nation's environmental laws. The act was the brainchild of Senator Henry M. "Scoop" J...
Greg Nickels was the 51st mayor of Seattle, a Democrat who served two four-year terms from 2002 through 2009, following a 14-year stint on the King County Council. While he ran for mayor as one who wo...