The main purpose of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was to achieve prohibition of alcoholic beverages by law. The organization, which is still in existence, came into being in 1873 and 1...
During World War II, women aviators took on flying roles for the U.S. Army Air Force. As civilian pilots, they ferried aircraft, towed targets for aerial and ground antiaircraft fire, and flight-teste...
The realm of rock 'n' roll (despite its many liberating attributes) is also a notoriously sexist one -- a place where males have always vastly outnumbered females as active players and where an exclus...
Women Painters of Washington (WPW) began as one of the earliest arts organizations in this region and remains among the very few statewide women's arts associations in the country. The group formed in...
Everett’s reputation as a mill town dominated by the lumber and shingle trade – industries that employed only men – has long overshadowed the importance women played in the...
In the late nineteenth century, women in the Pacific Northwest began to organize into groups to pursue social change and improvements in their communities. Their work was part of a larger, national wo...
A vigorous women's club movement began to sweep the nation in the mid-nineteenth century, enjoying a heyday from the 1890s through the 1920s. Washington state women were no exception to the wide enthu...
William D. Wood, an attorney, land speculator, electric trolley line president, and Seattle mayor, was a conspicuous figure in the business and political life of Seattle for more than a quarter centur...
Woodinville in eastern King County is an affluent, rapidly growing suburb located approximately 20 miles northeast of downtown Seattle; its population in the 2010 census was 10,938. Named after the fi...
The north King County community of Woodinville, located just east of Bothell, had a small one-room library in its local elementary school in the mid-twentieth century, but that had closed by 1964. Wit...
Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, now regarded as one of the nation's best, began with a small menagerie on Guy Phinney's sprawling Woodland Park estate between Phinney Ridge and Green Lake. In 1899, the C...
The Woodmont Library in Des Moines was built in 2000 to meet a need that had existed in southwest King County since the former Redondo Library closed in 1976, the need getting more acute as the area d...
Longtime owner, editor, and publisher of the Wenatchee Daily World and a major instigator of the Grand Coulee Dam, Rufus Woods was a titan of twentieth-century Pacific Northwest development. He was th...
William P. Woods was a civil engineer who worked his way up from pipefitter's helper to corporate leader in the natural gas industry. A native of Selma, Alabama, he was named president of the Washingt...
In this People's History Gerald Elfendahl of Bainbridge Island remembers the Bainbridge Island journalist and defender of human rights Walter C. Woodward Jr. (1910-2001). Woodward was an exemplary jou...
Woodway is a community located in the southwestern corner of Snohomish County, just south of Edmonds. It is known informally as the Town of Woodway and has a population (in 2008) of about 1,050. In Ma...
Philip A. Woolley was a railroad developer from Elgin, Illinois, who moved to Washington just as the territory became a state in 1889. With the help of Territorial Attorney General James Bard Metcalfe...
Randall E. Rydeen's (1906-1998) account of work and life at Cedar Falls was recorded on May 20, 1993 by Marian Arlin. The following is an excerpt from the Oral History Project of the Cedar River Water...
Walt Sickler (b. 1927) worked for Seattle City Light for 40 years. In 1989, he retired as the Director of Operations, in charge of all the dams, power transmission systems, and shops. His first job wa...
Eastern European Jews formed the Seattle branch of the Workmen's Circle in 1909. Known as the Arbeiter Ring in Yiddish, the Workmen's Circle was officially a socialist worker's organization but served...
This story, prepared by museum historian Lorraine McConaghy, Ph.D., begins with a Ouija board held in the collection of Seattle's Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI). The simple wooden board meas...
The U.S. entry into World War I, at the time called the World War or the Great War, proved a boon economically to Washington, but cost the state in lives and in the loss of civil liberties. The Great ...
Isolated in the far northwest of Washington state, San Juan, a county of islands located between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., only slowly learned of the momentous events taking place half a world away...
Leading up to and during World War II, three army general hospitals were constructed in Washington to treat those wounded or injured in the conflict. The first to open was Barnes General Hospital on t...