History

Spring 2014

New & noteworthy

Operation Cody: An Undercover Investigation of Illegal Wildlife Trafficking in Washington State

Todd A. Vandivert ’79

2013

Undercover game wardens Todd Vandivert and Jennifer Maurstad posed as husband and wife businesspeople in 2010 to bring down commercial poachers and black market dealers in wildlife parts. This first person account by former Washington State Fish and Wildlife Detective Vandivert tells of their success as they risked their lives to reduce wildlife destruction in the Pacific Northwest.

Isaiah Shembe’s Prophetic Uhlanga

Joel E. Tishken

Peter Lang Publishing, 2013

During South Africa’s colonial era, Zulu Zionist prophet Isaiah Shembe and his Nazareth Baptist Church congregants saw … » More …

Spring 2014

A Yankee on Puget Sound

Karen L. Johnson ’78 and Dennis M. Larsen ’68

WSU Press, 2013

Pioneer Edward Jay Allen lived near Olympia when the Oregon Territory was split in two and federal politicians elected to name the new territory Washington, rejecting the local suggestion of Columbia. Allen helped survey a wagon road over Naches Pass, a backcountry route still in use by those who favor mud and adversity over miles per gallon and speed. Future Union general George B. McClellan shared a cabin with Allen one summer, leading to a fast friendship a decade before … » More …

Winter 2013

Helen Szablya ’76—Living in interesting times

Only seven when World War II came to Budapest, Helen Szablya remembers that December night in 1944 when she woke to the sound of bombs. The Soviet air raid was just the beginning of a siege that lasted more than a year and led to a Soviet occupation that culminated in a bloody attempt at a revolution in 1956.

At one point during the siege, all 22 members of Szablya’s household took shelter in a little room that was normally used for ironing. It was on a lower floor and the safest place in the house. The family and their workers stretched their supplies, eating … » More …

Winter 2013

Of mice, men, and wheat

Although varieties abound, wheat can be more simply considered as either hard or soft, hardness being a measure of the kernel’s resistance to crushing.

All wheat originally was soft-kerneled. And there is, so far as we know, no evolutionary advantage to either the hard or the soft trait.

But clearly, somewhere along the line, that section of genetic material that determines the hardness of the kernel underwent a random mutation. Specifically, the Puroindoline a or Puroindoline b genes, which have long been a focus of Craig Morris’s research.

In order to understand the hard/soft divide, Morris, a plant physiologist, suggests that we consider the … » More …

Winter 2013

History develops, art stands still

An art historian journeys into the Renaissance

Maria Deprano meets me in Florence just outside of Santa Maria Novella, a church consecrated in the early Renaissance. While the green and white marble façade is spectacular, we’re here to look into the mysteries of the basilica’s interior frescoes.

A 2013 fellow with Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, DePrano has traded her post in Pullman for a year in Italy to research and write a book featuring a family of fifteenth-century Florence who appear in one particular set of the church’s frescoes. The Tornabuoni were art patrons who commissioned and were featured in artworks from some … » More …

Fall 2013

The Columbia Basin Project’s past and present

More about the Columbia Basin Project, its past, and its potential.

» More ...

Fall 2013

From Holland Library to hacking history

Of all the ways a college student can find trouble, at least Ralph Barclay started in the library.

It was 1960, and he was wandering through the engineering library, then on the third floor of Holland, when his eye was drawn to a freshly minted Bell Systems Technical Journal. Inside, amid some positively mind-numbing treatises, he found the article, “Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching.”

Years later, this one article would be referred to as “the keys to the kingdom,” a plain-spoken description of how the phone system evolved and, unbeknownst to the authors, the means by which an 18-year-old electrical engineering student from … » More …

Fall 2013

A fitting business

Growing up, Loralyn Young ’62 heard different versions of her Grandma Lucy, her grandmother’s mother. She was a Pennsylvania-born girl from a large family and for some time was apprenticed to a tailor. She married a homesteader more than 30 years her senior, and was widowed in Kansas with a young child at the age of 35. She later married Civil War veteran John Stevenson and started her second life. Then they moved to Washington where, at the age of 60, Lucy opened her own hat and dressmaking business in Issaquah. From some accounts, she was clever and hardworking. From others, precise and demanding.

“My … » More …

Fall 2013

First Words for Fall 2013

Uncle Sam took the challenge in the year of ’33

For the farmers and the workers and for all humanity

Now river, you can ramble where the sun sets in the sea

But while you’re rambling, river, you can do some work for me

—Woody Guthrie, “Roll, Columbia, Roll”

In the early 1950s, Washington State College and the Bureau of Reclamation published a Farmer’s Handbook for the Columbia Basin Project. Written for new farmers breaking ground in the newly irrigated Columbia Basin Project, the handbook offered advice on everything from what crops to grow to what kind … » More …

Fall 2013

Rugged Mercy: A Country Doctor in Idaho’s Sun Valley

Robert S. Wright

WSU Press, 2013

When 13-year-old Robert Henry Wright was caught spying on a kitchen table appendectomy, he was pulled in to assist. Inspired by that experience, the Hailey, Idaho, boy spent his early 20s in medical school, at first struggling to memorize the complex anatomy of the human body. After graduating, he married his childhood sweetheart, moved home to Idaho, and became a successful doctor, beloved in his community.

It … » More …