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New and Noteworthy
Winter 2014

New & noteworthy

 

After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness

David J. Leonard

SUNY Press, 2012

After a brawl at a Pistons-Pacers game in 2004, the NBA adopted policies to govern black players and prevent them from embracing styles and personas associated with blackness. This book by Leonard, associate professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University, discloses connections between the NBA’s discourse and the broader discourse of anti-black racism.

 

Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages

Timothy A. Kohler (editor), Mark D. Varien (editor)

University of California Press, 2012

This book examines how climate change, population size, interpersonal conflict, resource … » More …

Trail to Gold
Winter 2014

Trail to Gold: The Pend Oreille Route

Trail to Gold

 

Linda Hackbarth

Museum of North Idaho, 2014

 

During the Pacific Northwest’s mining boom in the second half of the nineteenth century, small communities to house and supply miners appeared throughout the West. And the need to move supplies into these areas lead to the arrival of steamboats on Lake Pend Oreille and the Clark Fork River.

Author Linda Hackbarth looks into the area around Lake Pend Oreille in the 1860s and the … » More …

Red Light to Starboard
Winter 2014

Red Light to Starboard: Recalling the Exxon Valdez Disaster

Red Light to Starboard

 

Angela Day

WSU Press, 2014

 

The Exxon Valdez and its 53 million gallons of crude oil made history on March 24, 1989. In the weeks and months that followed, more than 10 million gallons of oil bubbled into Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

Thousands of company menus, recorded meetings, news articles, and government documents provided Angela Day ample material for her book.

She corrals those notes and perspectives from whistleblowers, cannery … » More …

Nikkei Baseball
Winter 2014

Nikkei Baseball: Japanese American Players from Immigration and Internment to the Major Leagues

Nikkei Baseball

 

Samuel O. Regalado ’83 MA, ’87 PhD

University of Illinois Press, 2013

 

Since Sam Regalado received his doctorate in history in 1987, he has established himself as one of the leading authorities on the history of baseball and the Hispanic population in the United States. Now a professor at California State University Stanislaus, Regalado has penned an eminently readable history on how baseball helped Americans of Japanese descent construct an identity.

Regalado’s interest … » More …

Red brick road
Fall 2014

Follow the red brick road

In the early 1910s the town of Pullman saw its first automobiles, the city’s women were being instructed on how to exercise their new state-approved right to vote, and the Northern Pacific Railway had a busy depot along the South Fork of the Palouse River.

It was time to improve the precarious dirt roads from downtown to the Washington State campus.

A century later, a group of architecture students tackled a project to get those early paved roads formally recognized as a vital and worthy piece of history, not just for the community, but for the state’s University as well.

In a 1913 article in … » More …

Island Queens and Mission Wives
Fall 2014

Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World

Island Queens and Mission Wives

Jennifer Thigpen

University of North Carolina Press, 2014</p

 

When white missionaries landed on the sunlit shores of Hawai‘i in the early nineteenth century, they believed they were bringing God, culture, and civilization. They failed to realize that instead they were pulled into a sophisticated and long-standing system of Hawaiian diplomacy.

The missionaries’ relationship with the ruling families of Hawai‘i has long been the subject of study. But Thigpen, an associate … » More …

Tim Hills
Summer 2014

Tim Hills ’93—Hotels and history

The bodyguards standing sentry outside James Brown’s dressing room were as tall as the ceiling—an impossible 20 feet or so, remembers Tim Hills ’93 MA. But maybe it was his nerves.

After a long wait, the door opened and the historian was granted entry. Reclining on a sofa in Portland’s Crystal Ballroom, decked out in a blue leather suit, surrounded by his large entourage, the Godfather of Soul was prepared to entertain Hills’ questions for the next hour.

How did an unassuming public historian who once worked for the Congressional Information Service before earning a graduate degree in history from WSU end up interviewing one … » More …

John Mullan
Summer 2014

Lost highway

John Mullan closed the last link of the Northwest Passage and vanished from history—until now

On a May morning in 1858, along a small creek on the northern edge of the Palouse, hundreds of warriors from several Inland Northwest Indian tribes closed in on 160 Army soldiers led by Col. Edward Steptoe. An Army retreat turned into a 10-hour running battle. Two company commanders were mortally wounded, panicking the men. At last, the troops took up defensive positions on a hillside in what is today Rosalia. As night fell, they were surrounded, outgunned, and down to two rounds of ammunition apiece.

More than a … » More …