News | October 29, 2019
‘I belong in this community.’ A new museum tells the Pacific Northwest history of Latinx identity
It’s 2 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon and the crowd at a new Mexican American cultural center in South Park is at capacity. Bailadores de Bronce, Washington’s oldest Mexican folkloric dance group, takes the stage to present two distinct traditional dances that reveal the variety within Mexican culture. “I think when I was growing up I had…
News | October 8, 2020
163 veteran Metro bus drivers are retiring, taking 4,400 combined years of memories
You bet they have the stories. Decades of them. They’re a group with at least 4,400 combined years of memories. They’re the 163 older King County Metro bus drivers who this summer applied and were approved for a “voluntary separation” package, although that number might increase a bit. It meant saving the jobs of younger…
News | September 3, 2020
75 years after WWII, those who lived it share how it changed them, Seattle
PEACE! ran across the top of the Sept. 2, 1945, edition of The Seattle Sunday Times. Japan had surrendered. World War II was over. Peace, wrote a reporter from aboard a battleship, had formally come to the entire world after history’s most devastating war. “Today, the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great…
Course | HSTAA 540
African American Urban History: 1700-2000
Examines the growth and evolution of African-American urban communities from the colonial era to the present, with particular emphasis on cities of the West.Course | HSTAA 313
African Americans in the American West
Explores pre-1848 Spanish-speaking black settlers, slavery, post-civil war migration, buffalo soldiers. 19th and 20th century black urban settlers, World War II migration, the civil rights movement in the West, the interaction of African Americans with other people of color. Particular focus on Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.News | September 1, 2020
After push from Native organizations, King County will add tribal affiliations to its homelessness database
For the first time since government officials began collecting data on the thousands of people living homeless in King County, a new category on people’s tribal affiliations will soon be added to the system. The move comes after a years-long push from Native homeless service providers to collect better information on Native people in the county’s federally mandated homelessness database. In recent years, these providers have demanded…
News | August 4, 2020
After two months of protests, Seattle activists say work not done
The mass protests against police brutality and for racial equity that have dominated Seattle and the nation for the past two months are like few others in American history — a sustained, daily movement, in major cities, sleepy suburbs and rural towns, with no central organizing hub, driven by social media and word-of-mouth. Locally, the…
Course | HSTAA 508, URBDP 565
American Urban History
Intensive lecture/seminar designed to provide students the opportunity for immersion in historical scholarship that addresses social, economic, political, technological, and cultural forces that have shaped the development of American cities.Course | HSTAA 426
American Urban History Since 1870
Development of American cities for the past century. Topics include physical development, immigration, politics, and changes in society and culture.Scholar
Arbella Bet-Shlimon
Visit scholar websiteNews | September 8, 2023
Armed with Traffic Cones, Protestors Are Immobilizing Driverless Cars
All it takes to render the technology-packed self-driving car inoperable is a traffic cone. If all goes according to plan, it will stay there, frozen, until someone comes and removes it. An anonymous activist group called Safe Street Rebel is responsible for this so-called coning incident and dozens of others over the past few months….
News | November 19, 2019
Can Amazon shake its suburban mindset and become a responsible urban citizen?
What kind of urban citizen is Amazon going to be? High tech companies are traditionally a suburban phenomenon, and the burbs have been a gentler place for expansion than the heart of a city. The prototype, of course, is Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, and Seattle’s Eastside. In such places tech companies could sprawl,…
Course | HSTAM 332
Central Middle Ages
Europe in the central Middle Ages: culture of cathedrals and universities, formation of national states, development of urban society.Course | HSTAS 460 / SISEA 46
Cities in China: Past and Present
Economic, political, social, and cultural functions of the city in modern Chinese history. Changes in China's urban system. The city as cultural center and focus of literary and cinematic representation. Attention to architecture, commerce, urbanization, the role of capital cities in the power of the state.Course | AFRAM 334 / HSTAA 334
Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States
Examines the politics and culture of the modern African American freedom struggle, which began after WWII and continued into the 1970s. Interrogates political strategies associated with nonviolent direct action, armed self-reliance, and black nationalism, as well as the cultural expression that reflect these political currents.Course | HSTAA 353
Class, Labor, and American Capitalism
The history of workers and class formation form early industrialization to the present. Emphasizes the interaction of class with race, ethnicity, gender, and political culture within the context of American economic development. Explores the role of unions, labor politics, and radical movements.News | December 22, 2022
Covenant project unearths the threads of historical housing discrimination in Washington
It is not news that there were racial covenants built into the foundations of Spokane’s neighborhood developments during the middle decades of the past century. But a new state-funded research project is in the process of identifying every such covenant in Eastern Washington — and the tally is significant. The man who initially opened the…
News | August 3, 2021
Covid didn’t kill cities. Why was that prophecy so alluring?
From the moment U.S. coronavirus cases emerged in the Seattle area and then devastated New York City last spring, sweeping predictions about the future of city life followed. Density was done for. An exodus to the suburbs and small towns would ensue. Transit would become obsolete. The appeal of a yard and a home office…
News | July 2, 2020
Don’t be fooled by Seattle’s police-free zone
Seattle’s police-free “autonomous zone” is coming to an end. After two largely peaceful weeks, shootings over the last several days near the Capitol Hill Organized Protest area, CHOP for short, left a 19-year-old man dead and three others wounded. Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on June 22 that the city would retake the abandoned police precinct at the heart of…
News | December 5, 2019
Don’t blame tech bros for the housing crisis
Can Big Tech solve the housing crisis? That’s the hope behind recent announcements by Apple, Facebook and Google, which together total $4.5 billion in grants and loans to remedy the affordable-housing crunch in California and the Bay Area. Microsoft last year pledged $500 million to relieve Seattle’s similarly stressed market. While Amazon’s opposition torpedoed Seattle’s attempt in 2018 to raise revenue for homelessness services,…
Course | HSTAS 541
Economic and Social History of Japan to 1900
Analyses of landholding systems, the rise of commerce, demographic changes, urbanization, early industrialization, and social change.Course | ENVIR 221, HSTAA 221
Environmental History of the U.S.
Surveys the relationship between nature and human history, including the impact of the non-human environment on American history and the environmental effects of colonization, urbanization, and consumerism; the cultural construction of nature in different eras and its social implications; the sources and limits of modern environmental politics.Scholar
Eric W. Johnson
Visit scholar websiteNews | May 24, 2019
Event looks at past efforts to integrate schools in Seattle and what can be done now
May 17 was the 65th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that said segregating public schools by race was unconstitutional. Many public schools in Seattle remain segregated in spite of past efforts to address that, including several decades of busing. A national nonprofit group, Integrated Schools, hosted an event on Thursday,…
News | October 29, 2019
Facebook commits $1 billion to ease Bay Area housing crisis
Facebook Inc. is following other tech titans like Microsoft Corp. and Google, pledging to use its deep pockets to ease the affordable housing shortage in West Coast cities. The social media giant said Tuesday that it would commit $1 billion over the next decade to address the crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area, building as many as…
News | December 21, 2020
Hidden in plain sight: The ghosts of segregation
Originally written by Richard Frishman for the New York Times‘ series World Through a Lens. The six faded letters are all that remain, and few people notice them. I would never have seen them if a friend hadn’t pointed them out to me while we walked through New Orleans’s French Quarter. I certainly wouldn’t have…
Course | HSTLAC 282
History of Mexico: Culture, Identity, and the Politics of Rule from the Aztecs to the Present
Overview of Mexican history from late Aztec times until the twenty-first century. Emphasizes how women, campesinos, indigenous populations, free and enslaved Afro-Mexicans, and the urban poor experienced the past, challenged colonial and post-colonial rule, and shaped modern Mexican society and culture.Course | HSTAS 235 / JSIS A 235
History of Modern Taiwan
Social, cultural, political, and economic history of modern Taiwan from approximately 1600 to the present. Places Taiwan within global historical changes and explores Taiwan-centric issues in depth. Covers migration, colonialism, race and identity, urban and rural development, the Cold War, capitalism and industrialization, science, religion, labor, and gender.News | December 9, 2021
Home, not-so-sweet home
Imagine buying your dream home — and then learning you are prohibited from owning it. A surprising number of residential property deeds in Washington state contain clauses excluding certain groups from ownership. Those clauses are no longer enforceable thanks to a 1968 anti-discrimination law, but the exclusionary language — a reminder of sanctioned racism in…
News | September 28, 2021
Homeless in Silicon Valley’s shadow get help, but ‘sustainable’ change is elusive
Andrea Urton, who grew up homeless in Los Angeles, has seen how little corporate interests tend to care about helping the impoverished. So it was with some surprise when she received a phone call from an Apple representative. “I have never had an Apple or a Google or a Facebook reach out to me personally…
News | March 8, 2017
Honoring Women Collaborators at Urban@UW
In honor of International Women’s Day, we are highlighting just some of UW’s brilliant female professors, scholars, and and change-makers with whom Urban@UW is proud to collaborate. Click on their names to explore their work. Leadership: Thaisa Way, Executive Director, Urban@UW; Department of Landscape Architecture Executive Committee: Margaret O’Mara, Department of History Susan P….
News | May 10, 2022
How Bellevue’s tech hub is similar to Silicon Valley — and what they can learn from each other
Comparing Silicon Valley and Seattle has become something of a regional pastime in the Pacific Northwest. But the comparison might be more accurate if directed a few miles east, across the shores of Lake Washington to where Bellevue skyrises are multiplying. Because historically speaking, the rise of the eastside closely mirrors the trajectory of Silicon…
News | June 11, 2020
How Seattle’s unemployed survived the Great Depression
When the stock market crashed in fall of 1929, the road from joblessness to homelessness was short. Meager local relief programs and private charity weren’t up to the challenge of mass unemployment. As the Depression deepened and President Herbert Hoover resolutely opposed federal involvement in relief efforts, “Hoovervilles” sprang up around the country. Seattle’s largest shanty…
News | February 15, 2019
How Seattle’s 1919 General Strike Ignited America’s Labor Movement
On February 6, 1919, 65,000 union workers in Seattle walked off the job. On that Wednesday morning, barbers, newsboys, ice wagon drivers, stereotypers, electrical utility workers, and bill posters didn’t show up for work, a demonstration of solidarity with shipyard workers who had already been striking for two weeks in pursuit of higher wages. The…
News | December 5, 2019
Impact of WTO protests in Seattle still felt 2 decades later
An array of issues brought tens of thousands of protesters to Seattle 20 years ago Saturday, with one unifying theme: concern that the World Trade Organization, a then-little-known body charged with regulating international trade, threatened them all. With their message amplified not just by their numbers, but by the response of overwhelmed police who fired…
Course | HSTCMP 249 / POL S 249 / SOC 266
Introduction to Labor Studies
Conceptual and theoretical issues in the study of labor and work. Role of labor in national and international politics. Formation of labor movements. Historical and contemporary role of labor in the modern world.Scholar
James Gregory
Visit scholar websiteCourse | HSTAS 440/540, JSIS A 440/539
Japanese History in Ecological Perspective
Survey of Japanese history in ecological perspective, from early times to the present. Topics include ancient Japanese lifeways; climate and history; agriculture, population, and resources; Buddhist and animist views of outer and inner nature; urbanization from ancient capitals to megacity Tokyo; industrialization and energy; and future visions. Readings include influential scholarly works and Japanese sources in English translation.Scholar
LInda Nash
Visit scholar websiteScholar
Madeleine Yue Dong
Visit scholar websiteNews | January 30, 2020
Many Seattleites are now Voluntarily Paying Rent to the Duwamish
To help right the wrongs of history, thousands of people are paying rent each month to the Duwamish Tribe. Called “Real Rent Duwamish,” the all-volunteer effort — in partnership with the tribe — facilitates monthly “rent” payments to the tribe. Launched in 2017, Real Rent Duwamish has had 4,524 donors so far, now totaling around $20,000…
News | January 9, 2020
Mapping the segregation of Minneapolis
Before it was torn apart by freeway construction in the middle of the 20th century, the Near North neighborhood in Minneapolis was home to the city’s largest concentration of African American families. That wasn’t by accident: As far back as the early 1900s, racially restrictive covenants on property deeds prevented African Americans and other minorities…
Scholar
Margaret O’Mara
Visit scholar websiteNews | January 21, 2018
May HQ2 be ever in your favor: Amazon’s new short list pits 20 cities against each other
Amazon’s decision to establish a second and equal corporate headquarters outside of Seattle made the company an object of desire and scorn simultaneously, as cities were suddenly pitted against one another for the $5 billion prize. And while the 20 candidates that made Amazon’s HQ2 short list last Thursday are likely celebrating, the decision to…
Course | HSTAFM 463
Modern Persian Gulf
Introduction to the histories of Arabian Peninsula states, Iraq, Iran, and their linkages since the eighteenth century. Topics to be covered include imperialism and its legacies, political economy of oil, governmental structures and political transitions, identify formation, political ideologies, urbanization, and relations with the broader Middle East and Indian Ocean.News | January 31, 2016
Monthly Wrap up January 2016
It’s been a great start to 2016. UW Alumni association and History Department put together a woderful history lecture series: Excavating Seattle’s histories: Peoples, politics, and place check out details and videos here> The CBE also hosted a number of great speakers and events including SUSTAINING JAPAN: 3.11 FIVE YEARS ON lecture and panel discussion…
News | May 25, 2020
More remote work could send techies out of tech hubs… to a point
About a fifth of companies in the San Francisco Bay Area are following Twitter’s lead and planning to keep their workforces at home even after stay-at-home orders are lifted, according to a Bay Area Council survey of CEOs. The tech industry’s embrace of remote work during the pandemic raises a question: If everyone is working from home,…
Scholar
Nancy Beadie
Visit scholar websiteNews | July 31, 2019
National attention, praise for new Silicon Valley history ‘The Code’ by UW historian Margaret O’Mara
Her sweeping new book about the history of Silicon Valley has University of Washington history professor Margaret O’Mara on a busy national book tour this summer. The book, “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” was published this month by Penguin Press and is receiving many positive reviews. “The Code” takes the reader from the…
News | August 25, 2016
NEH Awards $179,000 for Urban-Nature Summer Institute at UW
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded nearly $180,000 for a new summer institute on the urban environment at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. The institute, City/Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities, examines how Western cultures have historically viewed city and nature as separate—and how a more integrative understanding can…
News | May 18, 2023
New Fee, Loans Aim to Right ‘Historic Wrong’ of Racist Covenants in Washington State
Members of communities once prohibited from buying homes under racist homeowner agreements, will soon get state homebuying assistance. The law signed last week by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee establishes a new $100 processing fee for homebuyers. The funds raised will help some first-time homebuyers cover down payments and closing costs. Tens of thousands of racially…
News | November 21, 2022
Over 40,000 households have racist restrictions, UW researchers estimate
State funding approved last year provided $250,000 for researchers at Eastern Washington University and the University of Washington to look for racist or restrictive covenants. The language has not been enforceable since the 1960s, but lead researcher UW Professor James Gregory said doing the work is worthwhile. ”We owe it to our fellow citizens not…
News | June 22, 2020
Protestors want Seattle de-gentrified – This is how it could happen
For more than a week, protesters against police brutality and racial injustice have occupied a six-block stretch of a Seattle neighborhood and turned it into a festive hub for their demonstrations. They named it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, since renamed the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), after police withdrew from a police…
Scholar
Quintard Taylor
Visit scholar websiteNews | July 9, 2020
Racial justice is an urban issue: A curated list of resources from UW BIPOC scholars
Racial injustice is not a new issue. Segregation and discrimination on the basis of race has long been tied to the built environments across the country, from redlining and restrictive covenants in the mid-1900s, to white flight and suburbanization after World War II, to the current trends of gentrification and displacement in cities throughout the…
Scholar
Raymond Jonas
Visit scholar websiteNews | July 12, 2023
Redlining Continues to Reverberate in Seattle Nearly a Century Later in Pedestrian Deaths
Could the decades-old government housing discrimination program, commonly called redlining, have anything to do with pedestrian fatalities today? According to a recent national study that compared federal redlining maps of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation with data on 2010–2019 pedestrian deaths from the national Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the answer is yes. A recent study…
Course | HSTEU 250 / ITAL 250
Rome
Focuses on Rome as an historical, intellectual, and artistic world center. Literary and historic documents, visual arts, architecture, film, and opera used to explore the changing paradigms of the Eternal City.News | January 25, 2019
Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project Launches Newly Designed Website
The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project currently records slightly more than 31,000 page views every month, 372,000 in the past year. And now, thanks to a new, mobile-friendly design, pages are more readable and can be scaled to cell phones and smaller devices, which will help bring more traffic to the project and encourage users…
News | June 30, 2020
Seattle’s activist-occupied zone is just the latest in a long history of movements and protests
The six blocks of occupied Seattle streets now known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or “CHOP”, have become a focal point of the nationwide anti-racist protests, eliciting both encouragement and concern. But for this Pacific Northwest city, it is far from the first time in the radical spotlight. Seattle has a long and storied history of…
News | July 12, 2022
Seattle’s Homelessness Chief Worries Inflation Will Erode Progress
The head of Seattle’s new agency responding to homelessness — in a city with one of the largest unhoused populations in the US — is concerned more people are about to land on the street because of inflation and rising prices for necessities like gas. With the pandemic making the challenges of homelessness more acute and more visible, Margaret…
Scholar
Shirley J. Yee
Visit scholar websiteNews | January 25, 2018
Shocker: It’s mostly men moving to Seattle for tech jobs
For every four men who moved to Seattle for a tech job in the last decade, only one woman did, too, according to a recent analysis that looked at the trend of tech transplants nationwide.To industry experts and academics, the findings from the careers website Paysa.com came as no surprise. The data is more of…
Course | HSTEU 245
St. Petersburg/Leningrad: City as History
Introduction of political, social, and cultural history of St. Petersburg from 1703-1991. Uses St. Petersburg as a window to explore major themes in Imperial Russian and Soviet history, including westernization and questioning of Russia's national identity, urbanization, industrialization, revolution, multinational empire, World War II, Stalinism, and socialistic reformism.Scholar
Thaisa Way
Visit scholar websiteCourse | HSTAA 413
The American West in History and Film
Examines emergence of American West since 1840 by looking at colonization processes; Native-white relations; economic and demographic changes; environmental issues; urbanization; western politics and the role of the state. Historians' evolving interpretations of the western past are considered alongside those in film in order to appreciate why the West has loomed so large in 20th-century American culture and identity.News | July 5, 2017
The biggest cliché in tech is hurting cities
If you don’t live in Silicon Valley, chances are you live in its close relative: “the next Silicon Valley.” The label has been slapped with abandon on towns, cities, regions, or sometimes entire countries. All it takes is an uptick in job growth, an influx of startups, or a new coding bootcamp for the cliche…
Course | HSTAA 208
The City: People, Place, and Environments
Surveys the history of cities in North America and around the globe from 1800 to the present. Considers economic and technological change; politics and government; city planning and landscaping design; migration and immigration, race, gender, and class; suburbanization; popular culture; and natural environments and natural disasters.News | August 27, 2020
The historian of Seattle hip-hop
In 1979, when Daudi Abe was 9, his father took him to Dirt Cheap Records and set him loose to explore. After a few minutes in the Central District store, Abe came up to the cashier carrying a 12-inch vinyl single with the words “Sugar Hill” across the top. “I just liked the sky-blue cover,”…
News | January 30, 2020
The Middle-Class Housing Crisis in Seattle
Kara Peters works at Seattle’s Central Library. She’s a third-generation Washingtonian who grew up in West Seattle. “Grandma, she did Mary Kay. She had four daughters who all went to West Seattle High School,” Peters said. But unlike her parents and grandparents, Peters can’t afford a house in Seattle, even though she makes a decent income. In…
Course | HSTAA 412
The Westward Movement, 1700-1850
Anglo-American advance into interior continental United States culminating in Far West occupation. Rivalry with New France and Spain in colonial period; role of federal government in westward expansion; land policy and distribution; migration, settlement, and pioneering; federal Indian policies and implementation; political evolution, urbanization, and economic development of trans-Appalachian West; shaping national character and institutions.News | January 6, 2021
The year inequality became less visible, and more visible than ever
This year, many Americans left the places where it was still possible to encounter one another. White-collar workers stopped going downtown, past homeless encampments and to lunch counters with minimum-wage staff. The well-off stopped riding public transit, where in some cities they once sat alongside commuting students and custodial workers. Diners stopped eating in restaurants,…
News | February 10, 2023
There are 4,000 racist housing covenants in Pierce County. You can find them on a map
Professor of history James Gregory knows the subject well. For roughly two decades, he’s been unearthing the ugly, racist underpinnings of racial disparities in wealth and homeownership seen to this day across Puget Sound. For Gregory, it started in 2005, when he first began to dig into discriminatory housing covenants in Seattle and later King…
News | March 31, 2016
Towards a Speculative Politics for African Cities with Edgar Pieterse – 4/12
Join us April 12 at Kane Hall (Room 120) for Visiting Scholar Edgar Pieterse, Please Register for this Public Event Towards a Speculative Politics for African Cities The available frames to understand and reimagine contemporary urban politics in the African context come down two divergent pathways: 1) build the institutional infrastructure to enact the deliberative…
News | April 23, 2018
Urban Scholar Highlight: Margaret O’Mara
Margaret O’Mara is a Professor in the Department of History and a founding member of Urban@UW. She writes and teaches about the urban, political, and economic history of the modern United States. What led you to your current research interests? I’ve always been interested in how politics and government work with business and economics, and…
News | October 20, 2017
Urban@UW compiles Faculty Highlights Report for research, teaching and engagement on homelessness
As part of its recently launched Homelessess Research Initiative, Urban@UW has collaborated with faculty and staff across all three UW campuses to compile a broad-ranging selection of powerful and robust projects addressing homelessness from a research lens. Check out the Faculty Highlights Report to learn more about these efforts and the people behind them.
Course | ENVIR 221
US Environmental History: Ecology, Culture, Justice
Covers the intertwined history of the environment and American society, focusing on issues of inequality and justice. Topics include colonialism, capitalist expansion, chemical and nuclear industrialism, the environmental inequalities of cities and suburbs, environmental movements, and environmental justice.News | May 9, 2023
Washington Seeks to Repair Harm Caused by Racially Restrictive Real Estate Covenants
Washington state is setting aside money to help people who were hurt by racially restrictive real estate covenants — documents that were used to enforce segregation in the early- to mid-20th century. On Monday, Gov. Jay Inslee signed a measure into law Monday that will create a downpayment assistance program for people affected by the…
News | January 27, 2021
Washington tribes join lawsuit to stop sale of National Archives in Seattle
Concerned it would threaten their cultural preservation, history and treaty rights, 40 tribes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska joined a Jan. 4 lawsuit with Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson to stop the federal government from selling the National Archives facility in Seattle and shipping its millions of boxes of records to California and Missouri….
News | January 23, 2024
What Happened to Seattle’s Relationship with Boeing?
The aftermath of the Alaska blowout reveals that the connection is slowly unraveling. From Seattle Met Written by Benjamin Cassidy IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of the fuselage blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight earlier this month, Margaret O’Mara noticed something that would’ve once been unthinkable in Seattle. The University of Washington history professor observed that locals…
Scholar