Spring 2013
A Nate Taylor (’02 Fine Arts) sampler
A small collection of lively illustrations Nate Taylor has created for his friend and WSU Classmate, fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss ’02 MA as well as some of Taylor’s other work.
» More ...Humanities
Spring 2013
Reading in the Genres
Experts from WSU share their opinions on what constitute the landmark works across literary genres.
» More ...
Spring 2013
Tribble Trouble
The famous Star Trek tribbles owe a lot to previous science fiction works, as does Princess Leia.
» More ...Spring 2013
Patrick Rothfuss ’02—World Builder
Fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss (’02 MA) enters the sleek atrium of the Chicago Hyatt with aplomb—passing through a lobby packed with weird characters. A human-sized rabbit taps away on a laptop, a steampunk Victorian-era archaeologist hunts for her friends, a green-haired space alien stands in line for a latte.
These are Rothfuss’s people. Or as he calls them, “Geeks of all creeds and nations.”
Rothfuss also looks weird. He hails from another time or place—maybe 1970s America, since Simon and Garfunkel peer out from his black t-shirt, or maybe the Middle Ages where his unruly beard would suit him in any village. Or maybe sometime … » More …
Spring 2013
Taste, an Accounting in Three Scenes
Questions of taste—let’s put it simply—can tire. Like a second colonoscopy. Like a second fall of man. Do we have to go through that again?
In the beginning, one is innocent of taste. Then, introduced to the concept, our new Adam and Eve realize their paradisal minds contain no data concerning the charms of early polyphony, track lighting, or cocktail recipes using angostura bitters. Cover up!
Now some years back, the Spanish metaphysician José Ortega y Gasset had the audacity (bad taste?) to question René Descartes. “I think, therefore I am,”Ortega y Gasset said, was based on a false premise. For some reason it didn’t … » 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
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 …