Books published by University of Washington Press

The European explorers who first visited the Northwest Coast of North America assumed that the entire region was virtually untouched wilderness whose occupants used the land only minimally, hunting and gathering shoots, roots, and berries that were peripheral to a diet and culture focused on salmon. Colonizers who followed the explorers used these claims to justify the displacement of Native groups from their lands. Scholars now understand, however, that Northwest Coast peoples were actively cultivating plants well before their first contact with Europeans. This book is the first comprehensive overview of how Northwest Coast Native Americans managed the landscape and cared for the plant communities on which they depended.Bringing together some of the world's most prominent specialists on Northwest Coast cultures, Keeping It Living tells the story of traditional plant cultivation practices found from the Oregon coast to Southeast Alaska. It explores tobacco gardens among the Haida and Tlingit, managed camas plots among the Coast Salish of Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia, estuarine root gardens along the central coast of British Columbia, wapato maintenance on the Columbia and Fraser Rivers, and tended berry plots up and down the entire coast.With contributions from ethnobotanists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, and Native American scholars and elders, Keeping It Living documents practices, many unknown to European peoples, that involve manipulating plants as well as their environments in ways that enhanced culturally preferred plants and plant communities. It describes how indigenous peoples of this region used and cared for over 300 different species of plants, from the lofty red cedar to diminutive plants of backwater bogs.

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for the joint evolutionary origin of art and intimacy, what we commonly call love.It all begins with the human trait of birthing immature and helpless infants. To ensure that mothers find their demanding babies worth caring for, humans evolved to be lovable and to attune themselves to others from the moment of birth. The ways in which mother and infant respond to each other are rhythmically patterned vocalizations and exaggerated face and body movements that Dissanayake calls rhythms and sensory modes.Rhythms and modes also give rise to the arts. Because humans are born predisposed to respond to and use rhythmic-modal signals, societies everywhere have elaborated them further as music, mime, dance, and display, in rituals which instill and reinforce valued cultural beliefs. Just as rhythms and modes coordinate and unify the mother-infant pair, in ceremonies they coordinate and unify members of a group.Today we humans live in environments very different from those of our ancestors. They used ceremonies (the arts) to address matters of serious concern, such as health, prosperity, and fecundity, that affected their survival. Now we tend to dismiss the arts, to see them as superfluous, only for an elite. But if we are biologically predisposed to participate in artlike behavior, then we actually need the arts. Even -- or perhaps especially -- in our fast-paced, sophisticated modern lives, the arts encourage us to show that we care about important things.

From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations--churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations--that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment.Seeking El Dorado is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.

Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003The word "violence" conjures up images of terrorism, bombings, and lynchings. Beaten Down is concerned with more prosaic acts of physical force--a husband slapping his wife, a parent taking a birch branch to a child, a pair of drunken friends squaring off to establish who was the "better man." David Peterson del Mar accounts for the social relations of power that lie behind this intimate form of violence, this "white noise" that has always been with us, humming quietly between more explosive acts of violence.Broad in its chronological and cultural sweep, Beaten Down examines interpersonal violence in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia beginning with Native American cultures before colonization and continuing into the mid-twentieth century. It contrasts the disparate ways of practicing and punishing interpersonal violence on each side of the U.S.-Canadian border. Del Mar concludes that we cannot comprehend the causes and moral consequences of a violent act without considering larger social relations of power, whether between colonizers and original inhabitants, between spouses, between parents and children, or between and among different ethnic groups.The author has drawn on a vast array of vivid sources, including newspaper accounts, autobiographies, novels, oral histories, historical and ethnographic publications, and hundreds of detailed court cases to account for not only the relative frequency of different forms of violence, but also the shifting definitions and perceptions of what constitutes violence. This is a thoughtful and probing account of how and why people have hit each other and the manner in which opinion makers and ordinary citizens have censured, defended, or celebrated such acts. Del Mar's conclusions have important implications for an understanding of violence and perceptions of violence in contemporary society.

"Ethnic Studies . . . has drawn higher education, usually kicking and screaming, into the borderlands of scholarship, pedagogy, faculty collegiality, and institutional development," Johnnella E. Butler writes in her Introduction to this collection of lively and insightful essays. Some of the most prominent scholars in Ethnic Studies today explore varying approaches, multiple methodologies, and contrasting perspectives within the field. Essays trace the historical development of Ethnic Studies, its place in American universities and the curriculum, and new directions in contemporary scholarship. The legitimation of the field, the need for institutional support, and the changing relations between academic scholarship and community activism are also discussed.The institutional structure of Ethnic Studies continues to be affected by national, regional, and local attitudes and events, and Ronald Takaki's essay explores the contested terrains of these culture wars. Manning Marable delves into theoretical aspects of writing about race and ethnicity, while John C. Walter surveys the influence of African American history on U.S. history textbooks. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Craig Howe explain why American Indian Studies does not fit into the Ethnic Studies model, and Lauro H. Flores traces the historical development of Chicano/a Studies, forged from the student and community activism of the late 1960s.Ethnic Studies is simultaneously discipline-based and interdisciplinary, self-containing and overlapping. This volume captures that dichotomy as contributors raise questions that traditional disciplines ignore. Essays include Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Marilyn Caballero Alquizola on the gulf between postmodernism and political and institutional realities; Rhett S. Jones on the evolution of Africana Studies; and Judith Newton on the trajectories of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies and their relations with marginalized communities. Shirley Hune and Evelyn Hu-DeHart each make a case for the separation of Asian American Studies from Asian Studies, while Edna Acosta-Belén argues for a hemispheric approach to Latin American and U.S. Latino/a Studies. T. V. Reed rounds out the volume by offering through cultural studies bridges to the twenty-first century.

Following its introduction to Korea in the late 19th century, Protestantism grew rapidly both in numbers of followers and its influence, and remained a dominating social and political force throughout the 20th century. Park charts this stunning growth and examines the shifting political associations of Korean Protestantism.Chung-shin Park is professor of Christian studies at Soongsil University, Seoul.

Kamran Scot Aghaie is assistant professor of Islamic and Iranian history at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Rising Tide of Color challenges familiar narratives of race in American history that all too often present the U.S. state as a benevolent force in struggles against white supremacy, especially in the South. Featuring a wide range of scholars specializing in American history and ethnic studies, this powerful collection of essays highlights historical moments and movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific to reveal a different story of race and politics. From labor and anticolonial activists around World War I and multiracial campaigns by anarchists and communists in the 1930s to the policing of race and sexuality after World War II and transpacific movements against the Vietnam War, The Rising Tide of Color brings to light histories of race, state violence, and radical movements that continue to shape our world in the twenty-first century.

Henry M Jackson's congressional career spanning the tenure of nine Presidents, Jackson had an enormous impact on the most crucial foreign policy and defense issues of the Cold War era, as well as a marked impact on energy policy, civil rights, and other watershed issues in domestic politics. This book presents the life and times of Jackson.

April Schueths is assistant professor of sociology at Georgia Southern University and a licensed social worker. Jodie Lawston is associate professor of women's studies at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Sisters Outside: Radical Activists Working for Women Prisoners and coeditor of Razor Wire Women: Prisoners, Activists, Scholars and Artists.

The salted paper print process and the daguerreotype were invented, for all practical purposes, simultaneously. Though using different materials and methods (the salted paper print was patented, while daguerreotype was not) still both achieved the miracle of fixing an image from life within a substrate¿in other words, they ushered in the medium of photography.The uses of each form of photography varied greatly. In Europe the salted paper print was valued for its aesthetic qualities-the massing of light and the softening of detail¿while in North America, the salted paper print was valued for its portability and reproducibility. At the same time, the three evolving regions that comprised North AmericäCanada, the United States and Mexico¿faced quite different realities and challenges than those in Europe (primarily France and Britain). In North America artistic merit was less of a priority, as each emerging nation faced vast, untamed territories, as well as social and political tumult. These were countries in the making¿defining borders, struggling to create identities, and establishing metropolitan areas and transportation networks, while the scions on the other side of the Atlantic cast a leisurely eye to their artistic, architectural, and colonial heritage for subject matter. Scant research has been done on the use of the salted paper print in North America during its brief period of use (approximately 1847¿1865); physical prints are often found in obscure collections and locations, and they are, as is true for most works on paper from that period, exceedingly fragile. This volume, with essays by three up and coming 19th-century scholars, offers new views on the use and employment of the salted paper print in North America. The hope is that this publication will encourage investigation, for the history of photography has many areas of terra incognita yet to discover.

Americans have been riding bikes for more than a century now. So why are most American cities still so ill-prepared to handle cyclists? James Longhurst, a historian and avid cyclist, tackles that question by tracing the contentious debates between American bike riders, motorists, and pedestrians over the shared road.

Edwin A. Martini is professor of history at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty and Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975¿2000. The contributors are Yooil Bae, Leisl Carr Childers, Brandon C. Davis, Heejin Han, David G. Havlick, Katherine M. Keirns, Neil Oatsvall, Jennifer Liss Ohayon, and Daniel Weimer.

Sarah Turner is professor of geography at McGill University. She is the author of Indonesia¿s Small Entrepreneurs: Trading on the Margins and editor of Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia. Christine Bonnin is lecturer in geography at University College Dublin. Jean Michaud is professor of social anthropology at Universit¿aval. He is the author of The A to Z of the People of the Southeast Asian Massif and coeditor of Moving Mountains: Ethnicity and Livelihoods in Highland China, Vietnam, and Laos.