Bøger i Emil and Kathleen Sick Book Series in Western History and Biography serien

Features a range of scholars specializing in American history and ethnic studies. This book offers a collection of essays that highlights historical moments and movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific to reveal a different story of race and politics.

Presents the history of the political economy of Butte and Montana.

Western historians offer a dozen essays grouped by the themes of Indians and non-Indians, race in the urban West, environment and economy, and gender on the unique geography, actions, and expectations that have shaped today's US West. Originated from a Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest

The Manhattan ProjectΓÇöthe World War II race to produce an atomic bombΓÇötransformed the entire country in myriad ways, but it did not affect each region equally. Acting on an enduring perception of the American West as an ΓÇ£emptyΓÇ¥ place, the U.S. government located a disproportionate number of nuclear facilitiesΓÇöparticularly the ones most likely to spread pollutionΓÇöin western states. The Manhattan Project manufactured plutonium at Hanford, Washington; designed and assembled bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico; and detonated the worldΓÇÖs first atomic bomb at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on June 16, 1945.In the years that followed the war, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission selected additional western sites for its work. Many westerners initially welcomed the atom. Like federal officials, they, too, regarded their region as ΓÇ£empty,ΓÇ¥ or underdeveloped. Facilities to make, test, and base atomic weapons, sites to store nuclear waste, and even nuclear power plants were regarded as assets. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, regional attitudes began to change. At a variety of locales, ranging from Eskimo Alaska to Mormon Utah, westerners devoted themselves to resisting the atom and its effects on their environments and communities. Just as the atomic age had dawned in the American West, so its artificial sun began to set there.The Atomic West brings together contributions from several disciplines to explore the impact on the West of the development of atomic power from wartime secrecy and initial postwar enthusiasm to public doubts and protest in the 1970s and 1980s. An impressive example of the benefits of interdisciplinary studies on complex topics, The Atomic West advances our understanding of both regional history and the history of science, and does so with human communities as a significant focal point. The book will be of special interest to students and experts on the American West, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.

Dismissed in early years as a wasteland, the rolling open country that covers the interior parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho is today one of the richest farmlands in the nation. This work is the story of its transformation. Meinig traces all of the aspects of its development by combining geographic description with historical narrative.

Through much of the twentieth century, black Seattle was synonymous with the Central District--a four-square-mile section near the geographic center of the city. Quintard Taylor explores the evolution of this community from its first few residents in the 1870s to a population of nearly forty thousand in 1970. With events such as the massive influx of rural African Americans beginning with World War II and the transformation of African American community leadership in the 1960s from an integrationist to a ΓÇ£black powerΓÇ¥ stance, Seattle both anticipates and mirrors national trends. Thus, the book addresses not only a particular city in the Pacific Northwest but also the process of political change in black America.