History

Spring 2013

Tastes like Beethoven

The 1909 National Apple Show in Spokane featured competitions, band concerts, vaudeville shows, and 1,525,831 apples. Spokane schools closed for a day so all the students could visit the exhibition, which spread across three and a half acres and featured intricate displays such as a giant American flag composed of apples and boxcars full of neatly packed apples.

Growers, shippers, bankers, and hundreds of the merely curious from around the Northwest flocked to the exhibition to revel in the fruit that Washington grew so well. When everyone had had their fill of the spectacle, the whole show was packed onto a special train and shipped … » More …

Spring 2013

Treasure, Treason and the Tower: El Dorado and the Murder of Sir Walter Raleigh

Paul Sellin ’52
Ashgate, 2011

Years ago while doing research in Stockholm, Sweden, Paul Sellin, a scholar who specializes in literature and history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, chanced upon some correspondence about Sir Walter Raleigh and gold that he may have found in South America.

Sellin, who studied history at WSU and then went on to the University of Chicago to complete a doctorate in English, is a professor … » More …

Winter 2012

Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, the Demands of Transcendence

Gregory S. Parks and Stefan M. Bradley (’98 MA History)

University Press of Kentucky

2012

Alpha Phi Alpha is the only black fraternity to be founded at an Ivy League school. Starting at Cornell in 1906, its founders were just a generation away from slavery and intent on creating an organization to foster academic scholarship, build lifelong friendships, and promote social progress. The organization soon opened chapters at Harvard, Howard, and Virginia Union … » More …

Winter 2012

The 1710 Senex map of North America

There were still plenty of blank spots on maps when cartographer and engraver John Senex (circa 1678-1740) created this 1710 map of North America. It is one of 33 early eighteenth-century maps from a Senex atlas in Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, acquired by the WSU Libraries in the mid-1950s. The atlas lacks a title page, but it is almost certainly Senex’s Universal Geographer, published circa 1725. It includes the bookplate of Sir Archibald Grant of Monymoske, Baronet (1696-1778), and was formerly part of his library.

Courtesy WSU Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections

» More …

Winter 2012

The Law and the Land

Indian Law Attorney Brian Gunn pushes into new territory for his tribe and others

In the summer of 1951, a Colville Indian named Peter Gunn sued the United States government for the loss of a portion of his ancestral lands. He joined members of a number of other tribes including the Lake, San Poils, Methow, Okanogan, and Nespelem, all living on the Colville reservation and whose homelands, which once covered nearly half of Eastern Washington, had been given to the public for settlement in the late 1800s.

Two generations later, Gunn’s grandson Brian, 38, filed another suit against the U.S. Department of the Interior, this … » More …

Fall 2012

The perfect city

Charles Francis Adams, a wealthy businessman from Boston, envisioned a perfect city. It was to be clean, well-maintained, and economically prosperous. It could not be too crowded. It had to be close to water. It would be somewhere in the West.

Adams and a group of fellow businessmen created the Lewiston-Clarkston Improvement Company and in 1896 chose the site of modern-day Clarkston for their garden paradise. There, they built the community of Vineland.

Now, Vineland’s story is being retold by WSU faculty and students.

“Vineland: Shaping Paradise” was installed as an exhibit in the WSU Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) in April. An … » More …

Fall 2012

The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States

Mark Fiege ’85 MA
University of Washington Press, 2012

Contemplate the founding of the United States, a budding democracy carved out of a vast and unknown (to everyone other than its original inhabitants) wilderness. At some point, one might find oneself unable to extricate American history from Nature and its effects and implications. But we haven’t really, not until Fiege’s remarkable analysis.

Although he is keenly aware of Thomas Jefferson’s warning that “The moment a … » More …

Fall 2012

Finding the River

Jeff Crane ’98, ’04 PhD
Oregon State University Press, 2011

In 1992, President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Elwha Act, which called for the removal of two hydroelectric dams from the 45-mile river that flows from Washington’s Olympic Range to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Over the past year, the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams have been removed and now the decades of sediment behind them are … » More …

Fall 2012

Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War

Erika Kuhlman ’95 PhD
New York University Press, 2012

In World War I, or the Great War, more than nine million combatants died, leaving behind approximately a million and a half widows. The war widows not only mourned their losses, they also faced quandaries about their new post-war roles in Germany, the United States, and other countries embroiled in the conflict. Would they perform as models of national self-sacrifice and … » More …

Summer 2012

Gallery: Historical Hanford

“When President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the go-ahead for the Manhattan Project, he set in motion an extraordinary collaboration amongst scientists and the military to develop an atomic bomb, driven by fears of Hitler’s creating one first. Whether or not the eventual dropping of the bombs on Japan was necessary to end the war in the Pacific will probably never be resolved. But the bomb undoubtedly changed the world, as well as the cultural, historical, and physical landscape of southeastern Washington.”

—From “The Atomic Landscape,” by Tim Steury

Take a photographic journey through the history of Hanford below. Images and much of … » More …