Topic: Roots
This reminiscence on traveling to a Croatian village to explore his roots was written by Steve Kink, who grew up in Bellingham's Slav fishing community. Steve's grandparents, Paul Kink (originally Kin...
Calvary Cemetery, located in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle, was the city's first major Catholic cemetery. The cemetery was dedicated in 1889 and remains active today. In all, more than 40,000 Ca...
In addition to his namesake city, Chief Seattle (178?-1866) is best remembered for a speech given, according to pioneer Dr. Henry Smith, on the occasion of an 1854 visit to Seattle of Isaac Stevens (1...
The Donation Land Law of 1850, or Oregon Land Law, permitted settlers on unsurveyed lands to select claims of 320 acres per settler (640 acres per married couple) provided they resided there for four ...
Ethiopians and Eritreans have lived in the Seattle area since the late 1960s, beginning with university students. From 1980 with the passage of the Refugee Act until about 2000, thousands of Ethiopian...
Festál, a joint community and city-led effort to provide a series of cultural festivals at the Seattle Center, was founded in 1997. The origins of the program may be traced back to the 1962 Wor...
With an estimated population of 30,000 (in the late 1990s), the Filipino American community forms the largest group of Asian Americans in the Seattle area. Beginning with the first known Filipino resi...
Many histories of the San Juan Islands and of Friday Harbor, the town on San Juan Island that is the county seat of San Juan County, report that the protected bay known as Friday Harbor (from which th...
The first Irish to come to the Pacific Northwest found a shifting social order with no established élites, cheap land, and broad economic opportunity. They took advantage of these prospec...
For more than a hundred years, Japanese Americans have made significant contributions to the commercial, cultural, and social history of Seattle and King County. Early immigrants arrived just before t...
Japanese immigrants began arriving in the Puget Sound area in the 1890s to work in the labor-intensive industries of railroad construction, logging, mining, fish processing, and agriculture. The Immig...
Korean Americans may be our least visible Asian American ethnic community. Yet this fast-growing population may also be one of the Puget Sound's most resourceful, energetic, and culturally rich immigr...
Latinos, the largest minority in the United States at more than 13 percent of the population as of 2006, have been instrumental to the development of Washington state since the 1774 Spanish exploratio...
This People's History is an interview with Margaret Reed conducted by Jyl Leininger on April 7, 1999, in Seattle, Washington. Margaret Reed describes herself as an every-day individual. "Believe me, I...
Carol Richman moved with her family to the Madrona neighborhood of Seattle in 1961. She was a member of the Central Area Community Council (Madrona and the Central Area are contiguous) and in this Peo...
The Snoqualmie tribe's story of Moon the Transformer, who created Snoqualmie Falls and transformed the Dog Salmon. This is a compressed retelling of the story as collected by Arthur Ballard from ...
Olaf Kvamme (1923-2013) a tireless leader of the Scandinavian community, Seattle church historian, former teacher, and Administrator for Seattle Public Schools describes his early life. Born in Norway...
By the 1880s, Norwegians were arriving in the Pacific Northwest in noticeable numbers. By 1910, more than 7,000 Norwegians lived and worked in the region. They lived all over King County but especiall...
The first wave of Samoan immigrants arrived in Seattle after World War II. Many new arrivals had worked on the naval base in Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, which closed with the end of the ...
Seattle was founded by members of the Denny party, most of whom arrived at Alki Beach on November 13, 1851 and then, in April 1852, relocated to the eastern shore of Elliott Bay. With the filing of th...
In June 1902, the first Sephardic Jews, Solomon Calvo (1879-1964) and Jacob (Jack) Policar (d. 1961), arrived in Seattle from Marmara, Turkey. In 1904, Nissim Alhadeff arrived from the Isle of Rhodes....
The Somali immigrant community in Seattle began as a small group of college students and engineers in the 1970s and 1980s. It has grown exponentially in the past 20 years as thousands of refugees of S...
Never in the history of the United States have so many people come from the same region in so short a time under such dire circumstances as did the Southeast Asian refugees in the decade after 1975. O...
It's been said that the 98118 ZIP code in Southeast Seattle is the most diverse in the United States. The claim is not quantifiably true, although it's easy enough to believe. Successive waves of newc...