“There wasn’t that many people, but they were good people.”--Madeline Gilles“First time I ever tasted cherries or even seen a cherry tree was [in White Bluffs]. Or ever ate an apricot or seen an apricot…It was covered with orchards and alfalfa fields.”--Leatris Boehmer ReidEuro-American Priest River Valley settlers turned acres of sagebrush into fruit orchards. Although farm life required hard work and modern conveniences were often spare, many former residents remember idy...

Like the rest of the American West, the mid-Columbia region has always been diverse. Its history mirrors common multiracial narratives, but with important nuances. In the late 1880s, Chinese railroad workers were segregated to East Pasco, a practice that later extended to all non-whites and continued for decades. Kennewick residents became openly proud of their status as a “lily-white” town.In Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance, the third Hanford Histories volume, four sch...

Old Classic cars and Tools layed out with auto parts

Fighting to Preserve a Nation’s Soul examines the relationship between religion, race, and the War on Poverty that President Lyndon Johnson initiated in 1964 and that continues into the present. It studies the efforts by churches, synagogues, and ecumenical religious organizations to join and fight the war on poverty as begun in 1964 by the Office of Economic Opportunity. The book also explores the evolving role of religion in relation to the power balance between church and state...

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty did more than offer aid to needy Americans; in some cities, it also sparked both racial conflict and cooperation. Race and the War on Poverty examines the African American and Mexican American community organizations in Los Angeles that emerged to implement War on Poverty programs. It explores how organizers applied democratic vision and political savvy to community action, and how the ongoing African American, Chicano, and feminist mov...

Winner of a Spur Award, presented by the Western Writers of America (WWA), for the Best Western Nonfiction Historical Book.Renowned historian Annette Atkins presents a fresh understanding of how a complex and modern Minnesota came into being in Creating Minnesota. Each chapter of this innovative state history focuses on a telling detail, a revealing incident, or a meaningful issue that illuminates a larger event, social trends, or politics during a period in our past.A thre...

In Women of the Northern Plains, Barbara Handy-Marchello tells the stories of the unsung heroes of North Dakota's settlement era: the farm women. As the men struggled to raise and sell wheat, the women focused on barnyard labor—raising chickens and cows and selling eggs and butter—to feed and clothe their families and maintain their households through booms and busts. Handy-Marchello focuses on the roles of women in this pioneer generation—their changing status from equal partnership to su...

The federally recognized Round Valley Indian Tribes are a small, confederated people whose members today come from twelve indigenous California tribes. In 1849, during the California gold rush, people from several of these tribes were relocated to a reservation farm in northern Mendocino County. Fusing Native American history and labor history, William Bauer Jr. chronicles the evolution of work, community, and tribal identity among the Round Valley Indians in the nineteenth and twentieth c...

Between the world wars, America embraced an image of the Ozarks as a remote land of hills and hollers. The popular imagination stereotyped Ozarkers as ridge runners, hillbillies, and pioneers—a cast of colorful throwbacks hostile to change. But the real Ozarks reflected a more complex reality.Brooks Blevins tells the cultural history of the Ozarks as a regional variation of an American story. As he shows, the experiences of the Ozarkers have not diverged from the currents of mainst...

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups — from government leaders to Red Power activists — had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America’s enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller here argues that a r...

"No part of the judiciary exposes the chasm between American ideals and institutional practice like federal Indian law. In By the Fire We Carry, Nagle, a Cherokee journalist, turns a case most Americans haven’t heard of into a legal thriller." —New York Times Book ReviewNATIONAL BESTSELLERThe New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 • Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year • NPR 2024 "Books We Loved" Pick • Esquire Best Book o...

New York Times BestsellerRising Star is the definitive account of Barack Obama's formative years that made him the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the CrossBarack Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted him into the national spotlight and led to his election four years later as A...