Staff of HistoryLink

Seattle has packed a lot of history into the 150 years since its incorporation. Much of that history--the stories, the people, dialogue and debate, conflict and vision--is preserved in the Seattle Municipal Archives. The collection's documents, maps, photographs, and ephemera bear witness to the texture, color, and voices of an ever growing and changing city. The 150 artifacts highlighted in this book illustrate a transformed geography, developed and redeveloped neighborhoods, and waves of city-defining immigration and emigration. They show us how the city's psyche and its physical and social landscape--its aspirations--are shaped. The steady push and pull of community organizers and civic leaders, and the everyday needs of the people who call this place home, give Seattle its remarkable spirit, just as they have since its first cornerstones were pounded into place on the shores of Elliott Bay.

Why does a city surrounded by water need another waterway? Find out what drove Seattle's civic leaders to pursue the dream of a Lake Washington Ship Canal for more than sixty years and what role it has played in the region's development over the past century. Historians Jennifer Ott and David B. Williams, author of Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography, explore how industry, transportation, and the very character of the city and surrounding region developed in response to the economic and environmental changes brought by Seattle's canal and locks.

Follow the history of Woodland Park Zoo from its nineteenth-century beginnings as a park originally carved from the wilderness north of downtown Seattle to promote a nearby real estate development. As Seattle grew, its zoo engendered civic pride and the animals in its growing collection became local personalities. By the 1970s, the zoo emerged as an international pioneer in zoo design. Lavishly illustrated, Woodland provides a narrative of changing ideas about the relationship between humans and animals, and a fond look at the zoo's animals and the people who care for them.

From wagon trails to interstate highways, this book retraces how the leaders and employees of the Washington State Department of Transportation and their predecessors helped to shape Washington's transportation system during a century of technological revolution and dramatic transformation of its communities and landscapes. Washington's transportation system includes one of the nation's finest road networks, an internationally renowned ferry system, passenger and freight rail, statewide airports, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, and a myriad of other programs.