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Spring 2026

Libraries

A close-up image of an open archival box containing neatly stacked, typewritten documents labeled "Daily annual 1960-1961." The documents are densely filled with text, and a black-and-white photograph is partially visible in the background.
Summer 2025

Diary excerpts from the Robert Shields Papers

 

Sample photos by Adriana Janovich except where noted. Archival photos courtesy WSU Libraries: Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections

Stack of worn books and folders

Robert Shields, a high school English teacher, minister, and manuscript editor, was born May 17, 1918, in Seymour, Indiana. He died at 89 on October 15, 2007, in Dayton, Washington.

In 1935 and again in the 1940s, he started and then stopped a couple of diaries. He also wrote poetry and short stories.

» More …

Fall 2024

Derring-do and an aviation first

 

WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections houses correspondence, business and financial records, photographs, printed material and other records belonging to Clyde Pangborn, donated by his brother Percy Pangborn in 1962. The collection is extensive and most of it must be viewed at the holdings but some of it can be examined at WSU Libraries Digital Collections.

 

Here is a video of former WSU archivist Mary Avery discussing the Pangborn Papers⁠—originally from KWSU-TV’s Mosaic series in 1967⁠—now available on WSU Libraries’ Films YouTube channel:

 

Here is a slideshow of some of the … » More …

Winter 2023

Building a Queer archive

With the Queering the Archives Initiative moving into its second year, Josie Cohen-Rodriguez and Lotus Norton-Wisla are focusing on building a student-centered and community-driven LGBTQ+ archive in the Washington State University Libraries.

“We want to build a broad coalition of folks who are vested in this archive and taking a sense of collaborative ownership,” Cohen-Rodriguez said. “That’s very empowering.”

Other archives in the Pacific Northwest are taking this approach, and Cohen-Rodriguez and Norton-Wisla had the opportunity to visit several of them in July 2023, thanks to a WSU 2023 Transformational Change Initiative (TCI) grant. TCI grants are awarded annually by the … » More …

Book cover of Pioneering Death
Winter 2022

Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon

Book cover of Pioneering Death

Peter Boag

University of Washington Press: 2022

 

His father slapped him, commanding him to tend to his chores. Instead, the 18-year-old marched into the farmhouse where he lived with his parents and siblings, grabbed his father’s rifle, and shot him in the back of the head before turning the weapon on his mother and a community member who had stopped to chat.

The more historian Peter Boag learned about the killing in west Linn County⁠—and its place in the larger … » More …