A park from pollution: 30 years after the ASARCO smokestack demolition, Tacoma’s waterfront transforms

By Lauren Gallup
An image of the ASARCO smelter in Tacoma, showing the smokestack rising above the waterfront. Photo credit Tacoma Public Library.
It was a clear day in Tacoma on January 17, 1993. Commencement Bay was crowded with boats. Families gathered on boat decks and across North Tacoma sidewalks to watch the demolition of what was once the tallest smokestack in the world, the ASARCO smokestack that loomed over Tacoma’s waterfront for nearly 100 years. With the press of a button, a child, supervised by Read More

Ever had beer soup? Bach did. And you can too!

By Gigi Yellen
The Little Bach Book cover
There’s a recipe for just this baroque-era staple included in The Little Bach Book by the Oregon-based tenor, Bach specialist and book designer David Gordon (Lucky Valley Press, 2017). Only 160 pages, including maps, glossary, timeline, recommendations for further reading and, yes, recipes, Gordon’s little book reveals the magnificent Johann Sebastian Bach as a man of his Read More

Past As Prologue: Rural Places Are Queer Places And The History Of WSU’s LGBTQ Awareness

By NWPB News
WSU Student newspaper The Daily Evergreen article on homosexuality.
What the struggle over recognition for WSU's Gay Awareness student group shows is some of the similarities between rural and urban LGBTQ rights. Rural areas — especially college towns like Pullman or Moscow — are also queer places. People in cities who were against gay rights used the same tactic as those in Pullman—the public-referendum—to deny housing or employment Read More

Past As Prologue: Remembering A Pasco Civil Rights Protest And Discrimination That Built Tri-Cities

By NWPB News
Black man in the middle of whites in line at grocery store.
By 1950, 20% of Pasco’s approximately 10,000 residents were Black, almost all living in slum conditions. Few lived in the new atomic community of Richland and none in “lily-white” Kennewick -- a fact of which Kennewick city leaders and police at the time were proud. Not only was housing segregated, but Black residents were forced to endure broad discrimination in Read More

Congress Formally Acknowledges 155-Year-Old Betrayal Of Warm Springs And Wasco Tribes

By Emily Cureton
Warm Springs first tribal council in 1928. From left to right: George Meachum, Isaac McKinley, Charley McKinley, Nathan Heath and Jackson Culps. Courtesy of The Museum at Warm Springs
Faced with the threat of forced removal or worse, in 1855 leaders of the Warm Springs and Wasco Tribes forfeited their claim to roughly ten million acres, and moved to a reservation. In exchange for land to offer white settlers, brokers for the United States government made promises. Among those: Tribal members would not be stopped from traveling off the reservation to Read More

Northwest Mask Wars And Pandemics: Nothing New For Washington As Politics Of 1918 Return

By NWPB News
Volunteers wearing gauze masks at a street kitchen in Cincinnati serve food to children of families afflicted by the flu pandemic in the winter of 1918-1919.
In 1918 Walla Walla, the chief of police, refused to enforce a state mask mandate. He pointed out that he was going to meet heavy resistance and, anyway, that he had no authority to carry out a state directive, only city ordinances. Still, he also openly defied the instructions of the city’s health officer, J.E. Vanderpool, to follow the state health officer’s guidance. Read More
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