History

Fall 2013

Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible

Richard D. Fulton ’75 PhD and Peter H. Hoffenberg

Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013

Devotees of Victorian-era writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad may well recognize the current of interest in Oceania, or the South Pacific, that runs through their stories.

During that period, from the 1830s to 1901, tales, photographs, travel books, and essays all fed and informed the … » More …

Summer 2013

Video: After Newtown: Guns in America

This PBS documentary examines the evolution of guns in America, their frequent link to violence, and the clash of cultures that reflect competing visions of our national identity.

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Summer 2013

New & noteworthy

Blazing a Wagon Trail to Oregon: A Weekly Chronicle of the Great Migration of 1843
by Lloyd W. Coffman ’87
Caxton Press-University of Nebraska, 2012

Diaries, letters, and reminiscences of pioneers tell the story of the earliest wagon trains to undertake the six-month trek from Missouri to Oregon in 1843, as they faced bad weather, threatening Indians, and scarce supplies.

Career Choices for Veterinarians: Private Practice and Beyond
by Carin A. Smith ’84
Smith Veterinary Consulting, 2011

The opinions and insights of experienced veterinarians offer examples of how veterinary students, current … » More …

Summer 2013

Gun Show Nation—a conversation with Joan Burbick

While researching her book Gun Show Nation, WSU English Professor Joan Burbick joined the National Rifle Association, visited gun shows around the country, and steeped herself in the history of American gun culture. Looking beyond the romance of the West, of Buffalo Bill and the magazine American Rifleman, she found issues of race, gender relations, moral crusades, and political and financial concerns.

As someone who writes nonfiction exploring the character and culture of America, Burbick has studied rodeo queens, examined Henry David Thoreau’s efforts to integrate natural history with human history, and looked into the American national culture of the 1900s. Now a professor emeritus, … » More …

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

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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 …