Before the advent of roads in western Washington, steamboats of the Mosquito Fleet swarmed all over Puget Sound. Sidewheelers, stern-wheelers, and propeller-driven, they ranged from the tiny 40-foot Marie to the huge 282-foot Yosemite, and from the famous Flyer to the unknown Leota. Floating stores like the Vaughn and shrimpers like the Violet sailed the same waters as the elegant Great Lakes lady, the Chippewa, and the homely Willie. A few, like the Bob Irving and Blue Star, died spectacularly or, like Major Tompkins, shipwrecked after a short time, while others began new lives as tugboats or auto ferries; some even survive today as excursion boats like the Virginia V. From 1853 to modern car ferries in the 1920s, this volume chronicles the heyday of steamboating--a unique segment of maritime history--from modest launch to sleek liner.

A fascinating story exists just below Seattles surface, buried in the citys many historic cemeteries. Founded in 1872 on land acquired from Doc Maynard, Lake View Cemetery holds the remains of one of Seattles favorite sons, Bruce Lee, whose son Brandon Lee is buried beside him. Maynard is also buried here, along with most of the Seattle pioneers, including the Dennys, Borens, Maynards, Yeslers, and Morans. Princess Angeline, Chief Sealths daughter, was buried here in a canoe-shaped coffin, and Madame Damnables remains supposedly turned to stone. Evergreen-Washelli Cemetery, founded in 1884 by the Denny family, contains Judge Thomas Burke, known as the man who built Seattle; a Veterans Memorial Cemetery dating from the Civil War; and two cannons from the USS Constitution, famously nicknamed Old Ironsides. Mount Pleasant Cemetery, founded in 1883 in Queen Anne, is the final resting place of the labor martyrs of the Everett Massacre and William Bell, of Belltown fame. Remembrance benches for Nirvanas Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrixs memorial are also local landmarks.

Situated in the Cascades about 50 miles east of Seattle, Snoqualmie Pass is intersected by the most heavily used route connecting eastern and western Washington. In the 1800s, use of the old Native American trail by explorers, cattlemen, and miners created a need for a wagon road. A railway and highway followed, and Snoqualmie Pass quickly developed into an all-season recreational paradise with over a half million visitors annually. Known for easy access to snow sports and the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area, nighttime ski operations, and the world-famous terrain of Alpental, Snoqualmie Pass is also a community of neighborhoods with both full-time and part-time residents who share a unique mountain lifestyle.

Fjord-like Hood Canal channels beneath the snowcapped Olympic National Park, creating a summer paradise of warm days and inspiring scenery as well as a haven for marine life and watercraft. For eons, Twana Indians crisscrossed in canoes that sliced through water like salmon. The canals first tourist, Captain Vancouver, sailed a launch down the scenic route in 1792. For the next century, a mosquito fleet of tugboats, stern-wheelers, fishing boats, and barges ferried the men who came for logging or land. By 1889, lumberman and legislator John McReavy promoted Union City as Venice of
the Pacific. In the 20th century, canal use shifted from logging to recreation as wealthy Easterners, San Francisco expatriates, and artists founded hunting lodges, fishing resorts, and even an artist colony. The Navy Yard Highway introduced automobile tourism, and new resorts, including Alderbrook, soon dotted the shoreline. After World War II, families bought summer homes and ski boats. Now, in the 21st
century, kayaks and personal watercraft skim across the waters, and the canal is more popular than ever.

The Key Peninsula is a scenic finger of land that stretches south between Case and Carr Inlets in Washington State. Few people lived there before 1850, although Native Americans fished and hunted from temporary villages. Several communities, each with a unique history, took root near the various bays and inlets of the peninsula, and by the 1890s, many areas bustled with schools, post offices, mills, churches, and stores. Logging, orchards, and chicken farms supported these early pioneers. Cut off from the mainland, the waters of Puget Sound provided transportation. The famous Mosquito Fleet carried products such as fruit, seafood, chickens, eggs, and butter to Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle until the advent of the ferries and, later, the bridges. Many of today's "oldtimers" are just two or three generations distant from the original hardy settlers, but the area's residents are proud of the heritage of this unique place they call home.

Ferryboats have been a way of life on Puget Sound since settlers first arrived there. From the wooden Mosquito Fleet to the sleek art deco Kalakala, the ferries of Puget Sound serve as a cultural icon to visitors and locals alike. Running from Point Defiance to Sidney, British Columbia, the Washington State ferry system is the single largest tourist attraction in the state, with 28 routes and 23 million riders annually. Names like Vashon, Kalakala, and Chetzemoka still resonate with fondness and nostalgia long after they have gone, while ships built the year Lindberg flew solo across the Atlantic will soon be pensioned off and pass into the "Ghost Fleet." In this volume, travelers are invited to look back to the past and bid Puget Sound's "ancient mariners" a fond farewell.

This book offers a first-person perspective on the institution of slavery in America, providing powerful, engaging interviews from the WPA slave narrative collection that enable readers to gain a true sense of the experience of enslavement. Today's students understandably have a hard time imagining what life for slaves more than 150 years ago was like. The best way to communicate what slaves experienced is to hear their words directly. The material in this concise single-volume work illuminates the lives of the last living generation of enslaved people in the United States-former slaves who were interviewed about their experiences in the 1930s. Based on more than 2,000 interviews, the transcriptions of these priceless interviews offer primary sources that tell a diverse and powerful picture of life under slavery. The book explores seven key topics-childhood, marriage, women, work, emancipation, runaways, and family. Through the examination of these subject areas, the interviews reveal the harsh realities of being a slave, such as how slave women were at the complete mercy of the men who operated the places where they lived, how nearly every enslaved person suffered a beating at some point in their lives, how enslaved families commonly lost relatives through sale, and how enslaved children were taken from their parents to care for the children of slaveholders. The thematic organizational format allows readers to easily access numerous excerpts about a specific topic quickly and enables comparisons between individuals in different locations or with different slaveholders to identify the commonalities and unique characteristics within the system of slavery. Provides a historical overview of the scholarship on slavery via first-person perspectives into the institution of slavery Supplies an introductory essay for each theme as well as brief contextual explanations for each excerpt with the text of the oral narrative Supplies primary source documents in the form of interviews with actual slaves from the WPA slave narratives that allow readers to better understand the experiences of those who lived in slavery Presents a history of the slave narratives project under the New Deal Gives eye-opening insights into the plight of women within the institution of slavery

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY "Full of...lively insights and lucid prose" (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States-from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day-written by one of the world's leading historians of Cuba. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued-through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raul Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country's future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington-Barack Obama's opening to the island, Donald Trump's reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden-have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an "important" (The Guardian) and moving chronicle that demands a new reckoning with both the island's past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This is a story that will give Americans unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba; "readers will close [this] fascinating book with a sense of hope" (The Economist). Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States-as well as the author's own extensive travel to the island over the same period-this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.

In the mountains of northern New Mexico above Taos Pueblo lies a deep, turquoise lake which was taken away from the Taos Indians, for whom it is a sacred life source and the final resting place of their souls. The story of their struggle to regain the lake is at the same time a story about the effort to retain the spiritual life of this ancient community. Marcia Keegan's text and historic photographs document the celebration in 1971, when the sacred lake was returned to Taos Pueblo after a sixty year struggle with the Federal government.

This revised and expanded edition celebrates the 40th anniversary of this historic event, and includes forwards from the 1971 edition by Frank Waters, and from the 1991 20th anniversary edition by Stewart L. Udall. Also contained here is new material: statements from past and current tribal leaders, reflections from Pueblo members, historic tribal statements made at the 1970 Congressional hearings and a 1971 photograph o

Connecticut's capital has served as home to some of the most influential women in the state's history, but few know the stories of their lives and accomplishments. Nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin became a catalyst for the Civil War. Ella Grasso was the first woman elected governor in the United States. Hannah Bunce Watson, publisher of the Hartford Courant, never skipped a single edition during the Revolutionary War. Through these and many more inspiring profiles, author and journalist Cynthia Wolfe Boynton chronicles the struggles and triumphs of some of Hartford's most remarkable women.

From one of America's most respected journalists and modern historians comes the highly acclaimed, "splendid" (The Washington Post) biography of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States and Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian. Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure-ridiculed and later revered-with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people. Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the twenty-first. "One of the best in a celebrated genre of presidential biography," (The Washington Post), His Very Best traces how Carter evolved from a timid, bookish child-raised mostly by a Black woman farmhand-into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer writing passionate, never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-nineties. This "important, fair-minded, highly readable contribution" (The New York Times Book Review) will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.

From the time it was founded in 1825, Akron was a town on the move. Once known as the "Rubber Capitol of the World," it brought droves of new workers to downtown and the suburban areas. With expansion came a need for entertainment, and wrestling was there for the multitudes. From the contrast of high school amateurs on mats to snarling villains and heroes in the professional ring, the sport thrived. There were the early days of traveling carnivals, with circuit-riding wrestlers who would take on all comers from the audience, to secretive fights set by shifty promoters in railroad yards with onlookers placing bets. There were the glory days of the Akron Armory--offering the crowd a chance to see such luminaries as the cigar-chewing Killer Tim Brooks, the smiling Johnny Powers, or the devious Don Kent--and beyond after the famed arena closed.

Over the course of 100 years, the prestigious Hotel du Pont has welcomed future and former presidents, first ladies, world leaders, Nobel Prize recipients, royalty, music maestros, sports legends, and stars of stage and screen--earning its reputation as the premier hotel in the state of Delaware. The Green Room, one of the most elegant hotel dining rooms in the country, features traditional French cuisine. The Gold Ballroom and other ornate European-inspired rooms provide luxurious venues for public and private events. A nationally recognized art collection showcasing original paintings by Andrew Wyeth adorns the Christina Room's walls. A state-of-the-art conference center and a 1,250-seat theater add to amenities that make the Hotel du Pont a first-choice destination for business and social events. Often labeled the front door of DuPont, the hotel is strategically located in the company's world headquarters.

The Zoot Suit Riots in 1943 and the infamous Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of the preceding year represent a turning point in the cultural identity and historical experience of Mexican Americans in the United States. This engaging study of these regrettable events provides context for understanding the continuing battles in the 21st century over immigration policy and race relations. Although the "zoot suit" had earlier been a black youth fashion trend identified with jazz culture, by the 1940s, the zoot suit was adopted by Mexican American teenagers in wartime Los Angeles, who wore it as their unofficial "uniform" as an act of rebellion and to establish their cultural identity. For a week in June of 1943, the Zoot Suit Riots, instigated by Anglo-American servicemen and condoned by the Los Angeles police, terrorized the Mexican American community. The events were an ugly testament to the climate of racial tension and resentment in Los Angeles-and after similar riots began across the nation, it became apparent how endemic the problem was. This book traces these important historic events and their subsequent cultural and political influences on the Mexican American experience, especially the activist and reform efforts designed to prevent similar future injustices. General readers will gain an understanding of the challenges facing the Mexican American community in wartime Los Angeles, grasp the racial and cultural resistance of the larger Anglo-American society of the time, and see how the blatant injustices of the Sleepy Lagoon trial and the Zoot Suit Riots served to galvanize Latinos and others to fight back. Those conducting in-depth research will appreciate having access to original materials sourced from Federal and state archives as well as newspapers and other repositories of information provided in the book. Connects the racially and socioeconomically motivated events of the World War II-era 1940s to the Chicano movement of the 1970s and the current battles over immigration legislation, allowing readers to see the recurring theme in American history Exposes the distortions of a yellow journalistic press in its coverage and treatment of the Sleepy Lagoon trial and Zoot Suit Riots, providing documentation of how white America's perception of Mexican Americans has been fashioned over many years by the mainstream media Documents how the zoot-suit and Pachuco cultures of Mexican American youths of the 1940s-an expression of their identity and an attempt to establish their place in the larger American culture-were a key reason behind the violent culture clashes Includes previously unpublished primary documents from the National Archives and Records Administration and the Franklin Roosevelt Library

The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities.
Featuring a cast of leading scholars working at the intersection of political science and American history, The Unsustainable American State is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. Collectively, the book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the contributors show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, they contend, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.