Pacific Northwest History: Secondary Sources

Becoming Nisei , based on more than forty interviews, shares stories of growing up in Japanese American Tacoma before the incarceration. Recording these early twentieth-century lives counteracts the structural forgetting and erasure of prewar histories in both Tacoma and many other urban settings after World War II.

Through an evaluation of Oregon's exclusionary laws, Leveraging an Empire examines the process of settler colonialism in the evolving region of the Pacific Northwest between the years 1841 and 1859. Oregon laws-through nuanced emphases and new articulations-related to national issues of slavery, immigration, land ownership, education, suffrage, and naturalization. Leveraging an Empire demonstrates how the construction of laws governing matters of race, gender, and citizenship from Oregon's pre-territorial days through its early statehood reified and institutionalized American legal definitions and national perceptions of these issues leading up to the Civil War.

With entertaining accounts gleaned from hundreds of interviews, Peter Blecha tells the story of music in the Pacific Northwest from the 1940s to the 1960s, a golden era that shaped generations of musicians to come. The local R&B scene evolved from the area's vibrant jazz scene, and Blecha illuminates the musical continuum between Ray Charles (who cut his first record in Seattle) and Quincy Jones to the rock 'n' rollers who forged the classic jazz-tinged "Northwest Sound."

Often cast as villains in the Northwest's environmental battles, timber workers in fact have a connection to the forest that goes far beyond jobs and economic issues. Steven C. Beda explores the complex true story of how and why timber- working communities have concerned themselves with the health and future of the woods surrounding them.