Past as Prologue

Past as Prologue essay about gendered epithets in Pacific Northwest politics and beyond.

The story of some Native American Scouts and their complicated reasons for working with the United States government.

In this Past as Prologue essay, WSU Professor Karen Phoenix explains the history of the shipping container and its Spokane ties.

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 equality to LGBTQ people.

Learn how sheep ranchers in the late-nineteenth century in Eastern Oregon were already a part of complex agricultural and industrial systems that provided food, clothing and commodities to markets across the U.S.

Prohibition did not limit the demand of alcohol, and many people did not support it, including the police. On an early morning in March 1920, Seattle Police Lieutenant Roy Olmstead and Sergeant T.J. Clark met a crew of bootleggers loading a shipment of Canadian whiskey from Vancouver, B.C. for Seattle. Olmstead and Clark were not there to arrest the criminals, but to watch over the process, since they controlled the operation.

The women athletes of early rodeo provide a broader understanding of women’s roles in rural history. Several top cowgirls like Fannie Sperry Steele, Mabel Strickland, and the Greenough sisters were born and raised on ranches across the Northwest. By studying these women, we have learned that women gentled and trained horses, moved cattle, and managed ranch duties.

During the early decades of the 20th century, Mark Matthews became one of the most powerful religious leaders in the United States. His Seattle congregation was the largest Presbyterian church in the world with more than 10,000 members at its peak.

Today we would recognize Harry Allen as trans. That term and concept did not exist in 1912, but there were many people in the past who had been assigned one sex at birth, but later in life transitioned to the sex that they more readily identified with.

The strike—and the violence that occurred—became George Pullman’s legacy, rather than his attempt to create the utopian worker’s town. When he died, his family buried him in a lead-lined coffin because they were concerned workers would try to desecrate it.