History

Winter 2014

Joanne Hanley ’80—Preserving public treasures

Joanne Hanley ’80 never expected that a master’s degree in environmental science would lead her to Gettysburg—one of the most significant sites in American history—or to supporting and creating several other memorials along the way.

During a 32-year career with the National Park Service, Hanley worked at more than a dozen historically and environmentally significant locations throughout the country. She oversaw the fundraising, design, and construction of the Flight 93 memorial to commemorate the September 11, 2001, crash. And, after serving as superintendent of the National Parks of Western Pennsylvania for a decade, she turned her energies to the field where a pivotal battle … » More …

Winter 2014

Lessons from Geronimo

When Mike Leach, coach of WSU’s football team, was a boy, he was in thrall with the story of Geronimo, a warrior who led a small group of Chiricahua Apache in defending tribal lands from invasion by Mexican and American settlers. A reader from an early age, Leach discovered the story at a public library in Cody, Wyoming.

“There was this book on Geronimo, the biggest book there. My mom said, ‘Maybe we should get a smaller book, maybe a book with pictures,’” says Leach. “It had footnotes, bibliography, and everything. It’s not something that belongs with a second-grader. But like a trooper, my mom … » More …

Winter 2014

Hair and history

On the first day of class this semester, Kristine Leier, a senior majoring in history and anthropology, returned one of the more macabre items owned by the WSU Libraries: a lock of hair from the murdered missionary, Narcissa Whitman.

Hair is not something we at WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections still collect. And how it came to be here, and where it has been for the last half century, turned out to be an intriguing story.

Narcissa Whitman’s name is familiar to many in the Northwest. She and her husband, Marcus, established their mission to the Cayuse Indians near Walla Walla in 1836. … » More …

Winter 2014

Lost writer from a lost time

A whole genre of literature, that of the American working class during the Great Depression, has all but disappeared. Now a WSU professor and a Northwest novelist are bringing writer Robert Cantwell, a Washington native, and his most significant book, Land of Plenty, out of the mists of time.

Cantwell, one of the finest American writers of the 1930s, was admired by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, says T.V. Reed, professor of English and American studies. His masterpiece is set in a Washington plywood factory and his characters are based on the workers he once toiled alongside.

Born in southwest … » More …

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 …

Winter 2014

Trail to Gold: The Pend Oreille Route

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 …

Winter 2014

Red Light to Starboard: Recalling the Exxon Valdez Disaster

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 …

Winter 2014

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

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 …

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 …

Fall 2014

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

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 …