Excerpted, by permission, from Dragons and Unicorns: A Natural History, by Paul ’55 and Karin Johnsgard.
One of the earliest known dragon slayers was the warrior Siegfried (in the Teutonic version), or Sigurd (Scandinavian version), who lived so long ago that the facts of his dragon-battle are greatly muddled. Some people believe that he slew the dragon Fafnir to rescue a captive maiden; in other accounts he was simply looking for treasure. Some centuries earlier, in England, Beowulf took on a similar dragon but was fatally wounded in the resulting battle. Clearly, the weapons and methods used by these early warriors were not … » More …
On the 90-minute commute from Cheney to Pullman to attend graduate school, Laurie Carlson’s eyes often strayed from the road to the cows grazing the rolling hills of the Palouse.
Carlson, who was completing her Ph.D. in history at Washington State University, found herself wondering what the animals were eating, how they were fed, and what their days were like.
To answer her questions, she decided to raise them.
Her interest in the animals also inspired her to write Cattle: An Informal Social History, looking at the symbiotic roles of cattle and humans.
It’s often like that. She recently published a children’s book about … » More …
Before there was Wisteria Lane, there was the French royal court at the Palais du Louvre in Paris. It was a place of forced marriages, lovers and infidelities, imprisonments and poisonings, sword fights and murders. And all that was just within the castle walls.
A little bit of that past is hidden in Washington State University’s archives, in a delicate book with a yellow leather cover. It is a firsthand account of life there with details of some of the greatest scandals and intrigues of French history.
The 378-year-old vellum-paged book holds the memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, also known as Queen Margot. She was … » More …
“We were living a good life,” said Albert Redstarr Andrews in a meditation concluding the second Plateau Conference, “and we were disturbed.” What might be taken as gracious understatement also resonated with profound loss.
In spite of a generally liberal sensibility and Native great-grandmother, I confess there have been times upon hearing Native Americans speak of the injustices of manifest destiny and conquest, I’ve wondered when they will finally accept, no matter the past injustice, that this is simply the way things are. Having attended the conference in October, however, I find I am still capable of learning.
The focus of this year’s conference was … » More …
Skepticism can forestall a too-willing acquiescence to
the-way-things-are; it can distance us from dogmatism and ward us away
from zealotry; it can expose our mistakes.
“This is the best research project I’ve ever had. It’s invaded my life in a very good way.” So says Birgitta Ingemanson, associate professor of Russian at Washington State University, about her current project transcribing and editing more than 2,100 letters written by an American woman, Eleanor Pray, in Vladivostok between 1894 and 1930.
The collection consists primarily of letters written by Pray and her sister-in-law, but also includes hundreds of photos taken by Pray of Vladivostok before the Russian Revolution and World War I. The array of letters and photographs provides glimpses of the city’s culture, politics, and merchant life from an American woman’s … » More …
Born and raised in Missouri, Smith Hill set one of her novels, A Voice from the Border, in the Show-Me state, and another, Ghost Horses, in South Dakota, where she lived and worked for nearly a decade.
And her early training as a newspaper reporter-long ago in Springfield, Missouri-is part of the reason for her success today as a writer of award-winning books and short stories for young women and girls, she says. “As a reporter, I had the chance to listen to people, to the way they talk, and to observe details of their own … » More …
