Summer 2010
Big Ideas
We delve into WSU's rich intellectual history, listing some of the great ideas and discoveries that have come out of our institution. » More ...
Social Sciences
Spring 2010
Video: Chicago gangs in the 1950s
Fifty years ago James F. Short Jr., a young sociologist at Washington State University, was asked to lead a study of Chicago gangs.
In this narrated slideshow, Short tells the stories behind photos of the groundbreaking 1956 study. You can read the story “Gangs of Chicago” here.
Spring 2010
A Cascade Pass Chronology
A timeline of the Cascade Pass from 15,000 years ago to the present.
North Cascades National Park, National Park Service
by R. Mierendorf and J. Kennedy, 2009
The events below, based on calibrated radiocarbon ages, are in calendar years before present:
15,000?
Glacier ice melts out of the pass.
9600
Early indigenous people camp at the pass and make and repair stone tools, some made from locally-collected stone. Other tool stone is carried in from distant sources, including Hozomeen chert from the upper Skagit River to the north and the Columbia Plateau to the east.
8500
Intensive use … » More …
Spring 2010
Gangs of Chicago
Fifty years ago James F. Short Jr., a young sociologist at Washington State University, was asked to lead a study of Chicago gangs.
In smoky pool halls on Roosevelt Road, the baseball fields of Douglas Park, and the windy street corners of Lawndale, Short and a team of youth workers and sociologists spent three years trying to figure out if boys with monikers like Smack Daddy, Duke, and Commando were so very different from their counterparts in wealthier parts of the city.
The resulting groundbreaking analysis opened a window into the everyday experience of the Vice Lords, the Egyptian Cobras, the Imperial Chaplains, and … » More …
Spring 2010
Of Time and Wildness in the North Cascades
Bob Mierendorf has spent the last couple of decades trying to convince the archaeological establishment that pre-contact Northwest Indians did not confine themselves to the lowlands, but frequented the high country. Now he has an ancient camping site to make his point. » More ...
Spring 2010
Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
Matthew Avery Sutton
Harvard University Press, 2007
No figure in early twentieth-century Christianity gained as much fame, notoriety, and acclaim as Aimee Semple McPherson. “Sister” McPherson oversaw the rise of an expansive empire—church services, radio, stagecraft, community service, politics, and print media—devoted to spreading her brand of fundamentalism and Pentecostal Protestantism. McPherson herself inspired a massive following, due in part to her charisma and ability to use modern techniques to further her cause of “old-time … » More …
Spring 2010
Women’s Voices: The Campaign for Equal Rights in Washington
Shanna Stevenson
WSU Press, 2009
This year marks the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage in Washington state. As the fifth state in the Union to allow women to vote, Washington’s landmark was more than a half-century in the making. In fact, in 1883, when Washington was a territory, woman did win the right to vote. Then, just five years later, the right was revoked and they had to campaign all over again.
In her latest … » More …
Winter 2009
Grover Krantz (1931–2002) and Clyde
I’ve been a teacher all my life, and I think I might as well be a teacher after I’m dead,” Grover Krantz told the Smithsonian’s anthropology collections manager David Hunt as they negotiated Krantz’s proposed donation of his skeleton to the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. As a physical anthropologist specializing in hominoid evolution, Krantz gleaned his understanding and ideas by studying the bones of apes and humans. Following his death, his own bones would become available for study.
Odds were, however, that his bones would remain in a drawer, alongside the bones of his three Irish wolfhounds, which he had already donated, waiting for whatever … » More …
Winter 2009
Talking turkey
As you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, you might like to know that turkey farming in North America has been around a lot longer than you thought. New genetic tools applied to a common turkey byproduct have given turkey afficionados a lot more to think about. » More ...
Summer 2003
The best organizations are run by lovers
Counseling psychologist Allen Johnson has been called everything from a “headpeeper” and “bug doctor” to a “shrink.” He takes issue with the latter label. In reality, he says he’s “an expander.”
He believes in the human capacity to create a better, more joyful world. It’s a message he gladly shares with others in his conversations, seminars, and two books, This Side of Crazy and The Power Within: The Five Disciplines of Personal Effectiveness.
After completing a doctorate at Washington State University (’85 Coun. Psych.), he spent six years as the principal organization and leadership development consultant for ICF Kaiser, an international, 3,500-employee construction and engineering … » More …