Dusting off his tape recorder for this companion volume to his popular River Pigs and Cayuses, Ron Strickland focuses on Washington, his adopted home. In Whistlepunks and Geoducks, Strickland introduces readers to a remarkable group of storytellers, from old-timers to new arrivals.In searching for people whose stories would add up to a portrait of the Evergreen State, Strickland discovered a region as alive with folklore as it is with natural beauty. Ranchers and wheat farmers, fishers and loggers, Indians and city folk, saloonkeepers and Prohibition agents, oystermen and hippies, and, naturally, whistlepunks and geoduck hunters, all rub elbows on the streets and trails of Strickland's Washington state. The author provides a helpful glossary to local terms and adds an index to names, places and livelihoods. Black and white photographs from both personal and archive collections allow the reader to see as well as hear the storytellers.In his introduction, William Kittredge notes that part of the joy of listening to these spirited oral histories lies in experiencing the subjects' use of work-place lingo. The pickaroon, for example, is a pike pole used to break up log james, while the long two-person saws are called misery whips or Swedish fiddles. We hunger for stories about specific worlds, and the particularities of making a go of things, Kittredge writes. We search them for clues about how we might make our own efforts succeed.

This entertaining and informative encyclopedia examines American regional foods, using cuisine as an engaging lens through which readers can deepen their study of American geography in addition to their understanding of America's collective cultures. Many of the foods we eat every day are unique to the regions of the United States in which we live. New Englanders enjoy coffee milk and whoopie pies, while Mid-Westerners indulge in deep dish pizza and Cincinnati chili. Some dishes popular in one region may even be unheard of in another region. This fascinating encyclopedia examines over 100 foods that are unique to the United States as well as dishes found only in specific American regions and individual states. Written by an established food scholar, We Eat What? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Bizarre and Strange Foods in the United States covers unusual regional foods and dishes such as hoppin' Johns, hush puppies, shoofly pie, and turducken. Readers will get the inside scoop on each food's origins and history, details on how each food is prepared and eaten, and insights into why and how each food is celebrated in American culture. In addition, readers can follow the recipes in the book's recipe appendix to test out some of the dishes for themselves. Appropriate for lay readers as well as high school students and undergraduates, this work is engagingly written and can be used to learn more about United States geography.

The image of a rough frontier – where working men were tempted away from church on Sundays by more profane concerns – was perpetuated by postwar church leaders, who decried the decline of religious involvement. In this pioneering book, Tina Block debunks the myth of a godless frontier, revealing a Pacific Northwest that consciously rejected the trappings of organized religion but not necessarily spirituality – and not necessarily God. Secularism was not only the domain of the working man: women, families, and middle-class communities all helped to shape the region’s secular identity. But rejection of religion led to family, gender, and class tensions. Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and archival sources, Block explores the dynamics of Northwest secularity, grounded in the cultural permeability of the Canada–United States border, the independent spirit of those who called the region home, and their openness to secular ways of experiencing the world.

In the 1920s, a battle rages between a spunky, half-Native American woman and a successful timber man, neighbors across the tides in Washington State's Puget Sound. Their backgrounds represent different races, cultures, spiritual beliefs and plans for the future. The teenaged girl Lilliwaup lives on the mainland with Blossom, an eccentric Indian grandmother who clings to memories of longhouses and potlatch give-away feasts. Blossom shapes Lilliwaup's beliefs with legends of the salmon people and Mt. Rainier. Lilliwaup also belongs to her father's Indian Christian Shaker church; she develops a powerful connection with the spirit world and relies on Jesus, her spirit guide StarBird, and shaking trances to overcome obstacles. Jack Brenner, a married timber executive, lives on a nearby island. He's come from Germany with a secret past and an uncanny ability to acquire what he wants. For several years, Lilliwaup and Brenner try to outfox one another. Lilliwaup goes after the Brenner's island, a place to restore Blossom's heritage. Inevitably, the two clash, come together and clash again. Eventually Ellie is born, a child who is determined to cross the tides and discover the truth. Untangling the truth threatens to undo them all.

Contains chapters on the discipline of oral history, especially as it relates to public history; starting an oral history project, including funding, staffing, equipment, processing, and legal concerns; conducting interviews; using oral history in research and writing, including publishing; videotaping oral history; and more.

Historical novel beginning in the last Ice Age, depicting first contacts between whites and Indians, Jedidiah Bowman, a young logger from Maine, fights at Gettysburg, rides the Oregon Trail settles outside Molalla, near Portland. Five generation of his family care for three hundred acres of forestland and help to build the West. Affirms both pioneers and Indians in a cast including over thirty tribes. In the 1970’s Daniel Bowman marries a Salish Indian girl, Shona Fullmoon. Their son Nathaniel grows up to be a logger, studies forestry and marries an activist. During the 1990’s, he becomes a double agent in the culture war between environmentalist and timber workers, focused on the northern spotted owl. Dramatize the conflict over forests and urban versus rural politics. Under cover, Nat contends with hit men, penetrates a cell of eco terrorists after 9/11and falls in love with the revisionists historians and prevailing ecological theory

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for the University of Idaho Press What Happened Here? Travelers interested in history want to know about the history of the sites that they pass in the Evergreen State. Who but veteran author Bill Gulick could write the premier historical travel book on Washington?