Oregon State University Press

For fifty years, Oregon State University Press has been publishing exceptional books about the Pacific Northwest—its people and landscapes, its flora and fauna, its history and cultural heritage. The Press has played a vital role in the region’s literary life, providing readers with a better understanding of what it means to be an Oregonian. Today, Oregon State University Press publishes distinguished books in several academic areas from environmental history and natural resource management to indigenous studies.

Showing 241-280 of 414 items.

Mink River

Oregon State University Press
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Discovering Main Street

Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest

Oregon State University Press

A unique guidebook to exploring small towns, “the last frontier of American tourism."

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No Small Potatoes

How a Family Potato Salad Recipe is Fast Becoming a Billion Dollar Business

Oregon State University Press
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Reflections of a Pragmatic Economist

My Intellectual Journey

Oregon State University Press
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Mexicanos in Oregon

Their Stories, Their Lives

Oregon State University Press
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To the Woods

Sinking Roots, Living Lightly, and Finding True Home

Oregon State University Press

The true story of a couple who, in their late fifties, traded modern conveniences for life in a tent and trailer without electricity or indoor plumbing.

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A River Without Banks

Place and Belonging in the Inland Northwest

Oregon State University Press
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The Lumberman's Frontier

Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America's Forests

Oregon State University Press
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A Force for Change

Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936

Oregon State University Press

A Force for Change is the first full-length study of the life and work of one of Oregon’s most dynamic civil rights activists, African American journalist Beatrice Morrow Cannady. Between 1912 and 1936, Cannady tirelessly promoted interracial goodwill and fought segregation and discrimination.

She gave hundreds of lectures to high school and college students and shared her message with radio listeners across the Pacific Northwest. She was assistant editor, and later publisher, of The Advocate, Oregon’s largest African American newspaper. Cannady was the first black woman to graduate from law school in Oregon, and the first to run for state representative. She held interracial teas in her home in Northeast Portland and protested repeated showings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation. And when the Ku Klux Klan swept into Oregon, she urged the governor to act quickly to protect black Oregonians’ right to live and work without fear. Despite these accomplishments—and many more during her twenty-five-year career—Beatrice Cannady fell into obscurity when she left Oregon in about 1938.

A Force for Change illuminates Cannady’s important role in advocating for better race relations in Oregon in the early decades of the twentieth century. It describes her encounters with the period’s leading black artists, editors, politicians, and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Oscar De Priest, Roland Hayes, and James Weldon Johnson. It dispels the myth that African Americans played little part in Oregon’s history and enriches our understanding of the black experience in Oregon.

A Force for Change is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of women’s history, gender studies, African American history, journalism history, and Pacific Northwest history. It belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in a richer understanding of the civil rights movement in Oregon and across the country.

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Another Way the River Has

Taut True Tales from the Northwest

Oregon State University Press

Cody’s prose rings with a sense of place. He is a native speaker who probes the streams and woods and salmon that run to the heart of what it means to live and love, to work and play, in Oregon.

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Race and Science

Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America

Oregon State University Press
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Oaks Park Pentimento

Portland's Lost and Found Carousel Art

Oregon State University Press
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River Basins of the American West

A High Country News Reader

Oregon State University Press
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Refusing War, Affirming Peace

The History of Civilian Public Service Camp #21 at Cascade Locks

Oregon State University Press
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Massacred for Gold

The Chinese in Hells Canyon

Oregon State University Press

In 1887, more than 30 Chinese gold miners were massacred on the Oregon side of Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. Massacred for Gold, the first authoritative account of the unsolved crime—one of the worst of the many crimes committed by whites against Chinese laborers in the American West—unearths the evidence that points to an improbable gang of rustlers and schoolboys, one only 15, as the killers.

The crime was discovered weeks after it happened, but no charges were brought for nearly a year, when gang member Frank Vaughan, son of a well-known settler family, confessed and turned state’s evidence. Six men and boys, all from northeastern Oregon’s remote Wallowa country, were charged—but three fled, and the others were found innocent by a jury that a witness admitted had little interest in convicting anyone. A cover-up followed, and the crime was all but forgotten for the next 100 years, until a county clerk found hidden records in an unused safe.

In bringing this story out of the shadows, Nokes examines the once-substantial presence of Chinese laborers in the interior Pacific Northwest, describing why they came, how their efforts contributed to the region’s development, and how too often mistreatment and abuse were their only reward.

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Davis Country

H.L. Davis's Northwest

Oregon State University Press
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Handbook of Oregon Birds

A Field Companion to Birds of Oregon

Oregon State University Press
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Living with Bugs

Least-Toxic Solutions to Everyday Bug Problems

Oregon State University Press
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Eden Within Eden

Oregon's Utopian Heritage

Oregon State University Press
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Afield

Forty Years of Birding the American West

Oregon State University Press
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The Way of the Woods

Journeys Through American Forests

Oregon State University Press
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The Environmental Justice

William O. Douglass and American Conservation

Oregon State University Press
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Nature’s Justice

Writings of William O. Douglas

Oregon State University Press
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Water in the 21st-Century West

A High Country News Reader

Oregon State University Press
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Pedaling Revolution

How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities

Oregon State University Press

Updated Edition includes a new epilogue by the author

In a world of increasing traffic congestion, a grassroots movement is carving out a niche for bicycles on city streets. Pedaling Revolution explores the growing bike culture that is changing the look and feel of cities, suburbs, and small towns across North America.

From traffic-dodging bike messengers to tattooed teenagers on battered bikes, from riders in spandex to well-dressed executives, ordinary citizens are becoming transportation revolutionaries. Jeff Mapes traces the growth of bicycle advocacy and explores the environmental, safety, and health aspects of bicycling. He rides with bicycle advocates who are taming the streets of New York City, joins the street circus that is Critical Mass in San Francisco, and gets inspired by the every-day folk pedaling in Amsterdam, the nirvana of American bike activists. Chapters focused on big cities, college towns, and America’s most successful bike city, Portland, show how cyclists, with the encouragement of local officials, are claiming a share of the valuable streetscape.

“A growing number of Americans, mounted on their bicycles like some new kind of urban cowboy, are mixing it up with swift, two-ton motor vehicles as they create a new society on the streets. They’re finding physical fitness, low-cost transportation, environmental purity—and, still all too often, Wild West risks of sudden death or injury.” —from the introduction

  • Copyright year: 2009
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Beauty of the City

A.E. Doyle, Portland's Architect

Oregon State University Press
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Wild Beauty

Photography of the Columbia River Gorge, 1860-1960

Oregon State University Press
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Strand

An Odyssey of Pacific Ocean Debris

Oregon State University Press
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Catching the Ebb

Drift-Fishing for Life in Cook Inlet

Oregon State University Press
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Stubborn Twig

Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family

Oregon State University Press
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With Grit and By Grace

Breaking Trails in Politics and Law, Memior

Oregon State University Press
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Oregon Coastal Access Guide, Second Edition

A Mile by Mile Guide to Scenic and Recreational Attractions

Oregon State University Press
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Linus Pauling

Scientist and Peacemaker

Oregon State University Press
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Here There Nowhere

Paintings by Michael Brophy

Oregon State University Press
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Teaching Oregon Native Langauges

Edited by Joan Gross
Oregon State University Press

In a world where over half of the remaining six thousand languages will most likely disappear by the end of the century, attention has finally begun to focus on the struggles of indigenous people to save their languages. Lack of knowledge concerning the vast linguistic diversity of Oregon's languages has been a major obstacle to language ...

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To Harvest, To Hunt

Stories of Resource Use in the American West

Oregon State University Press

To Harvest, To Hunt is a rich collection of writings that reveals how diverse peoples have valued and used natural resources throughout the history of the American West. Drawing on family letters, oral traditions, historical records, and personal experience, the book's contributors offer readers new perspectives on the land they live on, ...

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