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 1-50 of 414 items.

Virginia's Apple

Collected Memoirs

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2024
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River of Renewal

Myth and History in the Klamath Basin

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2024
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Nature on the Edge

Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2024
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Burn Scars

A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2024
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Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River

The Global Fight for Indian Independence and Citizenship

Oregon State University Press

Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River traces the global and local forces at play behind two momentous events in Indian and Indo-American history which began in Oregon in the early 1900s: the radical Indian independence organization known as Ghadar and Thind, an epoch-defining U.S. Supreme Court citizenship case.

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Oregon Indians

Voices from Two Centuries

Oregon State University Press

In this deeply researched volume, Stephen Dow Beckham brings together commentary by Native Americans about the events affecting their lives in Oregon. Now available in paperback for the first time, this volume presents first-person accounts of events threatening, changing, and shaping the lives of Oregon Indians, from “first encounters” in the late eighteenth century to modern tribal economies.

The book's seven thematic sections are arranged chronologically and prefaced with introductory essays that provide the context of Indian relations with Euro-Americans and tightening federal policy. Each of the nearly seventy documents has a brief introduction that identifies the event and the speakers involved. Most of the book's selections are little known. Few have been previously published, including treaty council minutes, court and congressional testimonies, letters, and passages from travelers’ journals.

Oregon Indians opens with the arrival of Euro-Americans and their introduction of new technology, weapons, and diseases. The role of treaties, machinations of the Oregon volunteers, efforts of the US Army to protect the Indians but also subdue and confine them, and the emergence of reservation programs to “civilize” them are recorded in a variety of documents that illuminate nineteenth-century Indian experiences.

Twentieth-century documents include Tommy Thompson on the flooding of the Celilo Falls fishing grounds in 1942, as well as Indian voices challenging the "disastrous policy of termination," the state's prohibition on inter-racial marriage, and the final resting ground of Kennewick Man. Selections in the book's final section speak to the changing political atmosphere of the late twentieth century, and suggest that hope, rather than despair, became a possibility for Oregon tribes.   

  • Copyright year: 2006
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Field Guide to Oregon Rivers

Oregon State University Press

A  practical, informative, and inspiring guide to the rivers of Oregon, ideal for residents of the state and visitors alike.

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Cooperatives across Clusters

Lessons from the Cranberry Industry

Oregon State University Press

Most agricultural production is of commodity or undifferentiated products. Producers suffer from a roller-coaster ride of price swings, over- or under-production, weather and pest threats, and the inability of family famers to capture anything beyond a small percentage of the final price.

Cooperatives Across Clusters provides lessons from the cranberry industry, a commodity product organized mostly into family farms in seven different clusters around North America. The industry is remarkable in that it's substantially organized around one large cooperative, Ocean Spray. The authors examine how the cooperative came to be, the challenges of coordination and industry leadership across the diverging clusters, and the lessons for cooperation for other agricultural industries.

The book provides a multi-layered contribution to agricultural economics. First, it examines location decisions and what factors supersede growing conditions to allow industries to arise around production. Second, it explores pathways available for farmers to try to overcome, through cooperative organization, the natural boom-bust cycles of commodity price swings. Third, it looks at how cooperative decisions are made, and the challenges of providing industry leadership, including research and development and collective marketing, through a cooperative that faces continual defections and new problems. Finally, through in-depth historical, statistical, and field research, it provides a comprehensive study of the cranberry industry and suggests ways farmers can grow the industry. Agricultural policymakers, farmers, industry specialists, and researchers of agriculture and clusters more generally will find this to be an important and informative new resource.

  • Copyright year: 2024
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I Lived to Tell the World

Stories from Survivors of Holocaust, Genocide, and the Atrocities of War

Oregon State University Press

I Lived To Tell the World recounts the experiences of individuals who have survived Holocaust, genocide and the atrocities of war, honoring the complexity of the survivor’s stories while providing historical and cultural context for these troubling worldwide events.

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest

Oregon State University Press

A key component in healthy ecosystems, lichens can be found in almost any natural habitat in the Pacific Northwest. This comprehensive guide to the region’s macrolichens is intended for use by beginners as well as specialists: weekend naturalists will be able to identify specimens and recognize the great diversity of lichens, while lichenologists and mycologists will gain greater knowledge of the distribution and abundance of various species.

This updated third edition of Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest includes 95 additional species and an expanded introduction. It features keys to 109 genera and 681 species of Oregon and Washington macrolichens—all the macrolichens known or expected to occur in the two states. The keys also provide excellent coverage for lichens of Idaho and Montana, inland to the Continental Divide. Color photographs and detailed descriptions emphasize lichens prevalent in forested ecosystems.

The illustrated glossary and introductory material cover the terminology needed to identify macrolichens and provide information on collection and handling. The biology, ecology, and air-quality sensitivity of lichens are discussed; regional air-quality sensitivities are provided for nearly 200 species.

Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest will prove invaluable to anyone seeking to identify lichens or to better understand these organisms and their vital role in the natural world.

 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Making the Unseen Visible

Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure

Oregon State University Press

Many of the effects of nuclear fallout and radiation have been intentionally hidden by governments around the world. Public knowledge has been driven by activists demanding recognition and justice. Many Downwinders fought for years, in the press and in the courts, to have their health and environmental concerns taken seriously. Just as radiation is invisible, many of these stories continue to be unseen.

From 2017 to 2020, Jacob Hamblin and Linda Richards facilitated the Oregon State University Downwinders Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, to support research and scholarship on the Downwinders cases near the Hanford nuclear site in Washington. Additionally, each summer the project team sponsored a workshop that brought a variety of stakeholders together to explore the science, history, and lived history of radiation exposure. These workshops took a broad view of nuclear contamination, beyond Hanford, beyond the United States, and beyond academia. Community members and activists presented their testimonies and creative work alongside scholars studying exposure worldwide.

Making the Unseen Visible collects some of the best work arising from the project and its workshops. Scholarly research chapters and reflective essays cover topics and experiences ranging from colonial nuclear testing in North Africa to uranium mining in the Navajo Nation and battles over public memory around Hanford. Scholarship on nuclear topics has largely happened on a case study basis, focusing on individual disasters or locations. Making the Unseen Visible brings a variety of current community and scholarly work together to create a clearer, larger web uniting nuclear humanities research across time and geography.

  • Copyright year: 2023
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One Sunny Day

A Child's Memories of Hiroshima

Oregon State University Press

“Every year when the days begin to stretch and the penetrating heat of summer rises to a scorching point, I am brought back to one sunny day in a faraway land. I was a young child waiting for my mother to come home. On that day, however, the sun and the earth melted together. My mother would not come home. . . .”

Hideko was ten years old when the atomic bomb devastated her home in Hiroshima. In this eloquent and moving narrative, she recalls her life before the bomb, the explosion itself, and the influence of that trauma upon her subsequent life in Japan and the United States. Her years in America have given her unusual insights into the relationship between Japanese and American cultures and the impact of Hiroshima on our lives.

This new edition includes two expanded chapters and revisions throughout. A new epilogue brings the story up to date, covering Hideko’s work as an anti-nuclear activist, including her visit to the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. This poignant story of courage and resilience remains deeply relevant today, offering a profoundly personal testimony against the ongoing threat of nuclear warfare.
 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Spinning Tea Cups

A Mythical American Memoir

Oregon State University Press

In these quirky and richly told tales, Alexandra Teague brings readers along for the wild ride of her youth, traversing wide swaths of the American landscape in the company of a talking puppet, Victorian ghosts, and a family fueled by fantasy, dysfunction, and fierce love.

Why did people who shunned the culture of consumerism and prided themselves on making everything from scratch take annual trips to Disney World, the mecca of mass-manufactured fun? Did her mother really have psychic abilities? Why did her sensitive youngest nephew speak in a voice that wasn’t his own? How do family legacies of grief and dysfunction and creativity intersect? How can she escape her circumstances without replicating the escapist fantasies with which she was raised?

Teague attempts to understand and contextualize her family in terms of trauma and mental health, but also with deep love and humor. Carefully attuned to the vagaries of geographical cultures, she weaves her family’s history with explorations of pop culture and the specific cultures of the places she and her family pass through: a Texas city, an Arkansas Victorian tourist town, a Southwest ghost town, Central Florida, the Bay Area, Kansas City, and Moscow, Idaho—a college town in the Inland Northwest.

Spinning Tea Cups will appeal to readers interested in American cultural studies, those concerned with the ongoing crisis of mental illness in this country, and anyone seeking to explore the dangerous and recuperative powers of fantasy.

  • Copyright year: 2023
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He, Leo

The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch

Oregon State University Press

Largely remembered for his mysterious disappearance in May 1971, Lew Welch was an important voice of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. He spoke of key issues that America was facing in the aftermath of World War II—from the rise of consumerism and complacent suburban sensibilities to the threat of environmental disaster. He championed American speech, idioms, and identities. He found inspiration in the words of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, in the philosophies of Senzaki and the Buddha, and in his myriad friendships with some of the most renowned and revered poets, musicians, and artists of the 1950s and 1960s. His search for authenticity in language and poetry was a small part of a far greater search to establish a clear sense of himself.

He, Leo investigates Welch’s life and work in a chronological fashion, structured around Welch’s own notion of how three main aspects of his life—The Man, The Mountain, and The City—were interdependent. From his birth until his disappearance and presumed death, Welch’s life was often defined by problems, including a complex relationship with his mother, a long struggle with alcohol, and a fluctuating mental state. He was open and candid about everything, a fact that is evident in all aspects of his work.

Each of the three main sections of He, Leo includes key poems, essays, and events—both personal and cultural—to help establish Welch’s importance as a prominent poet and figure during the San Francisco Renaissance. Despite his crushing self-criticism and his reputation as a “friend of,” he was a bona fide poet with a strong voice and message of his own. With this first full-length biography, Ewan Clark restores Lew Welch to his rightful place as an important member of a significant American literary and cultural movement.

 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Constructing a Democracy

The History, Law, and Politics of Redistricting in Oregon

Oregon State University Press

Every ten years, states go through the process of redistricting: choosing how to divide up and apportion their state and federal legislative districts. How the districts are drawn can determine which party wins the district and therefore controls the legislature or Congress. Although the process may be different in every state, the questions are the same: Who draws the maps? Who can prevent gerrymandering? What power do legislatures, governors, courts, and political parties have to influence the process and the outcomes?

In Constructing a Democracy, legal scholar Norman Williams presents a comprehensive history of legislative and congressional redistricting in Oregon. Because redistricting impacts the representativeness of the ensuing legislative body, Oregon’s constitutional framers, legislators, and courts alike have understandably focused on developing legal rules to constrain the redistricting process. Williams is primarily interested in identifying and understanding the scope of those rules: What legal constraints have existed over time? How aggressively have the courts enforced those restraints? How have political actors undertaken the redistricting task in light of the various rules and the judicial pronouncements regarding those constraints?

The redistricting process in Oregon has not drawn national attention the way it has in states like North Carolina and Pennsylvania. But the process in Oregon is notable in several ways, including an early attention to malapportionment, the use of the initiative to reform the process, and the impact of women leaders on the redistricting process. The Oregon process, however, has also notably lagged behind other states, particularly in considering issues of race and minority representation and preventing gerrymandering.



 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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First Meal

By Julie Green; By (artist) Julie Green; Commentaries by Kirk Johnson
Oregon State University Press

Wrongful convictions haunt the American criminal justice system, as revealed in recent years by DNA and other investigative tools. And every wrongfully convicted person who walks free, exonerated after years or decades, carries part of that story. From those facts, artist Julie Green posed a seemingly simple question: When you have been denied all choice, what do you choose to eat on the first day of freedom?

In the small details of life at such pivotal moments, a vast new landscape of the world can emerge, and that is the core concept of First Meal. Partnering with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, Green and her coauthor, award-winning journalist Kirk Johnson, have created a unique melding of art and narration in the portraits and stories of twenty-five people on the day of their release.

Food and punishment have long been intertwined. The tradition of offering a condemned person a final meal before execution, for example, has been explored by psychologists, filmmakers, and others—including Green herself in an earlier series of criminal-justice themed paintings, The Last Supper. First Meal takes on that issue from the other side: food as a symbol of autonomy in a life restored. Set against the backdrop of a flawed American legal system, First Meal describes beauty, pain, hope and redemption, all anchored around the idea—explored by writers from Marcel Proust to Michael Pollan—that food touches us deeply in memory and emotion.

In Green’s art, state birds and surreal lobsters soar over places where wrongful convictions unfolded, mistaken witnesses shout their errors, glow-in-the-dark skylines evoke homecoming. Johnson’s essays take us inside those moments—from the courtrooms where things went wrong to the pathways of faith and resilience that kept people sane through their years of injustice. First Meal seeks to inform and spread awareness, but also celebrate the humanity that unites us, and the idea that gratitude and euphoria—even as it mixes with grief and the awareness of loss—can emerge in places we least expect.

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Scene Shifting

Photographs from Left of Iowa

By (photographer) Dan Powell
Oregon State University Press

In an introductory essay to Scene Shifting, Dan Powell speaks of his father’s influence on him in his youth. He describes growing up in the 1950s and 60s in the Roza District, a spacious agricultural valley that was etched out of the sage desert in South Central Washington. He also traces the impact that the nearby Hanford Atomic Works had on his family and the region. At an early age Powell’s concept of the American West was shaped by all three of these factors. The 101 black and white duotone images featured in this compelling volume are mostly from large format negatives (8x10 and 4x5). They highlight a particular period in Powell’s art practice, the 1980s and 90s, when he photographed in the high desert country of Oregon and Washington, as well as in Nevada, California, Arizona, Idaho, and Utah. Several images from the Midwest mark his graduate school experience and first teaching position, before he migrated back to the West to teach photography at the University of Oregon. In photographing the West, Powell was interested in the land as a dynamic theater, the constant shifting of events that moved through his view, on and off road. Points of intersection, the clashing of events where humans interface with the land, occur often within this fabric of beauty and wildness. Powell’s view of the West is broad and diverse, from the visual harmony found in the vastness of space and light, to ironic tensions found through chance and close observation. On one level, Powell was simply measuring his vision of the land against the memories of his childhood. In the second essay, “The Geography of a Life,” esteemed curator, historian, and author Keith F. Davis sheds light on the nature and particular qualities of the work, and on how it is deeply embedded in Powell’s lifelong experience with the West. 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Sap in Their Veins

Portraits of Loggers and the Trees They Fell

By (photographer) David Paul Bayles; By David Paul Bayles
Oregon State University Press

In 1972 David Paul Bayles left the suburbs of Los Angeles for a summer job as a logger. Then, instead of heading off to photography school in the fall as planned, he stayed. Four years later, celebrating the end of his last day of logging with his crewmates over a few beers, the woods boss toasted him: “We wish you well in photo school and please don’t forget us dirty old loggers.”  

Bayles didn’t. A decade later he returned to the forests of the northern Sierras, Mount Shasta, and Redwood coast regions to create a photo exhibition that traveled through California and Oregon. In 2004 he expanded the project, focusing on how northern California’s logging industry had changed and altered the lives and culture of the men with whom he’d spent long days working in forests, men who worked with their hands and intuition. He discovered that with the increased industrialization of the forest and the arrival of machine-oriented tree felling, work that had relied on experience in meeting challenges, on camaraderie and trust, was in danger of becoming more like a robotically-operated assembly line. As one logger told Bayles, “They’re taking the Paul Bunyan out of logging.”  

There’s a poignancy to these portraits and the stories they tell of changing times, hard times, and the humor found in between the dire risks loggers encounter every day. Bayles’ photographs and oral histories introduce us to men who love the forests in which they’ve spent, and sometimes risked, or lost, their lives. Many lament the unnecessary loss of trees and the advent of practices favoring quick profits over safety and sustainability. Bayles’ work is a testament and tribute to a fast-disappearing chapter of American woodsmen, one that may soon be forgotten.

  • Copyright year: 2023
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There Was an Old Woman

Reflections on These Strange, Surprising, Shining Years

Oregon State University Press

Andrea Carlisle isn’t struggling with her new identity as the Old Woman in the ways society seems to think she should. In fact, she is finding her later years to be an extraordinary and interesting time. In trying to understand the discrepancy, she interrogates the sources of negativity in literature, art, and received wisdom that often lead women to dread this transformative time of life. Given the cultural pervasiveness of ill will toward older women, it is small wonder that growing older is not seen as a natural, even desirable, process. Although some elements of aging are hard to reckon with, there is much to make use of and delight in, along with mysteries, surprises, and revelations.

In these personal essays, Carlisle looks for new ways to bring herself more fully to this time of life, such as daily walks with other women and connecting to the natural world that surrounds her houseboat on an Oregon river at the foot of a forest. She writes about experiences shared with many, if not most, older women: wondering at her body’s transformation, discovering new talents, caregiving, facing loss, tuning in to life patterns and drawing strength through understanding them, letting go (or not) of pieces of the past, and facing other changes large and small.

Those curious about, approaching, or living in old age will find wisdom and insight in her unique perspective. In a voice that rings with clarity, humor, and humility, Carlisle shows us that old age is not another country where we can expect to find the Old Woman grimly waiting, but is instead an expansion of the borders in the country we’re most familiar with: ourselves.

  • Copyright year: 2023
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An Ocean Garden

The Secret Life of Seaweed

Oregon State University Press

In this captivating book, artist and avid beachcomber Josie Iselin reveals the unexpected beauty of seaweed. Produced on a flatbed scanner, Iselin’s vibrant portraits of ocean flora reveal the exquisite color and extraordinary forms of more than two hundred specimens gathered from tidal pools along the California and Maine coasts. Her engaging text, which accompanies the images, blends personal observation and philosophical musings with scientific fact. Now available in paperback for the first time, this edition includes a new foreword and updated nomenclature. An Ocean Garden is a poetic and compelling tribute to the natural world and the wonder it evokes.  

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Hydraulic Societies

Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History

Oregon State University Press

Hydraulic Societies explores the linked themes of water, power, state-building, and hydraulic control. Bringing together a range of ecological, geographical, chronological, and methodological perspectives, the essays in this book address how humans have long harnessed water and sought to contain its destructive power for political, economic, and social ends. Water defines every aspect of life and remains at the center of human activity: in irrigation and agriculture; waste and sanitation; drinking and disease; floods and droughts; religious beliefs and practices; fishing and aquaculture; travel and discovery; scientific study; water pollution and conservation; multi-purpose dam building; boundaries and borders; politics and economic life; and wars and diplomacy.

From the earliest large irrigation works thousands of years ago, control over water has involved control over people, as the essays in this volume reflect. The intersections of water and political, economic, and social power historically span international as well as domestic politics and operate at scales ranging from the local to the global. The authors consider the role of water in national development schemes, water distribution as a tool of political power, international disputes over waterways and water supplies, and the place of water in armed conflicts. They explore the ways in which political power and social hierarchies have themselves been defined and redefined by water and its control, how state leaders legitimized their rule both culturally and economically through the control of water, and how water management schemes were a means to impose and refine colonial power.

 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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They Never Asked

Senryu Poetry from the WWII Portland Assembly Center

Oregon State University Press

In 1942, after Executive Order 9066 was issued, Japanese American families were removed from their homes in Oregon and the Yakima Valley and sent to the Portland International Livestock Exposition Center, where they were housed in converted animal stalls. The Wartime Civil Control Administration forcibly held these Japanese Americans at the Portland Assembly Center until September 1942, when they were transferred to newly built permanent incarceration camps at Minidoka, Heart Mountain, and Tule Lake.

The Japanese American communities in Oregon and southern Washington were relatively small and many of the detainees knew each other; they drew on existing family and community networks to help each other through the long summer, living in inhumane conditions under the constant threat of violence. Several members of Bara Ginsha, a Portland poetry group, decided to continue their work while imprisoned at the center, primarily by writing senryū, a type of Japanese poetry related to haiku.

They Never Asked is a collection of work produced by Bara Ginsha members in the WCCA camp, based on a journal kept by Masaki Kinoshita. The senryū collected here were written by a group of twenty-two poets, who produced hundreds of poems. Individually, the poems reflect the thoughts and feelings the authors experienced while being detained in the center; collectively, they reflect the resilience and resistance of a community denied freedom. Editors Shelley Baker-Gard, Michael Freiling, and Satsuki Takikawa present translations of the poems alongside the originals, supplemented by historical and literary context and a foreword by Duane Watari, Masaki Kinoshita’s grandson.


 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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My Name is LaMoosh

Oregon State University Press

My Name is LaMoosh is the life story of Warm Springs Tribal Elder Linda Meanus. She grew up with her grandma Flora Thompson and grandpa Chief Tommy Thompson near Celilo Falls, a mighty fishery on the Columbia that was flooded in 1957 by the construction of The Dalles Dam. Linda persevered through this historic trauma and life’s challenges to teach young people about the Indigenous ways of the Columbia River. Intended for early readers to learn more about Native American history through a first-hand account, the book is also a reminder that Indigenous people continue to maintain a cultural connection to the land and river that gave them their identity.

My Name is LaMoosh includes fact boxes that provide historical, cultural, and environmental context for Linda’s personal story. Hundreds of books exist about Lewis and Clark and their journey of “discovery.” This book balances our understanding of American history with the long-neglected voices of Indigenous people. Linda’s story is not just about historic trauma but also about resilience, perseverance, and reciprocity.

Published in cooperation with Confluence

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The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan

The Wild Science of Saving Old Growth Ecosystems

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2023
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Protest City

Photographing Portland's Summer of Rage

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2023
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Forest Park

Portland's Natural Sanctuary

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2023
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The Jackson County Rebellion

A Populist Uprising in Depression-Era Oregon

Oregon State University Press

The Jackson County Rebellion explores a dramatic if little-known populist insurgency that captured national attention as it played out in rural Oregon. Jeffrey LaLande traces the rebellion’s roots back to the area’s tradition of protest, including the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, then focuses on Jackson County’s politics of upheaval during the worst days of the Great Depression. The broad strokes of the episode may be familiar to contemporary readers, with demagogues fanning rage and relentlessly accusing an elite of corruption and conspiracy.

Two inflammatory local newspapers, one owned by wealthy orchardist Llewellyn Banks and the other by politician Earl Fehl, became the vehicles by which these men won followers. Partners in demagoguery, Banks and Fehl created a movement that very nearly took over county government through direct action, ballot theft, and threats of violence. Among those opposing the two men was Harvard-educated Robert Ruhl, owner/editor of the Medford Mail Tribune. Despite boycotts and threats of sabotage, Ruhl ran a resolute editorial campaign against the threat in his Mail Tribune, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the uprising.

The rebellion blazed hotly but not for long. Its end was marked by the arrest of its leaders after the fiercely contested 1932 election and by Banks’s murder of the police officer sent to arrest him. Placing the Jackson County Rebellion squarely within America’s long tradition of populist uprisings against the perceived sins of an allegedly corrupt, affluent local elite, LaLande argues that this little-remembered episode is part of a long history of violent conflict in the American West that continues today.

 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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As the Condor Soars

Conserving and Restoring Oregon's Birds

Oregon State University Press

As the Condor Soars focuses on the increasing role that ornithologists played in public agencies, changing ideas about ecosystems, and conservation debates in Oregon. These themes are most clearly seen in the battles over the northern spotted owl and the development of the Northwest Forest Plan. Contributors to this volume also discuss new developments in the study of birds, such as sound studies, and connections between ornithologists and artists. The volume includes illustrations by Ram Papish. 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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A Peculiar Paradise

A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940

Oregon State University Press

Published in cooperation with Oregon Black Pioneers

A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788–1940, remains the most comprehensive chronology of Black life in Oregon more than forty years after its original publication in 1980. Elizabeth McLagan’s work reveals how in spite of those barriers, Black individuals and families made Oregon their home and helped create the state’s modern Black communities. A longtime resource for those seeking information on the legal and social barriers faced by people of African descent in Oregon, the book is available again through this co-publication with Oregon Black Pioneers, Oregon’s statewide African American historical society. The revised second edition includes additional details for students and scholars, an expanded reading list, a new selection of historic images, and a new foreword by Gwen Carr and afterword by Elizabeth McLagan.

  • Copyright year: 2022
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A Force for Nature

Nancy Russell's Fight to Save the Columbia Gorge

Oregon State University Press

A Force for Nature is a biography of a person and a place. It describes how Nancy Russell, a woman with no political, fundraising, or organizing experience, mounted a national campaign to overcome eighty years of conflict—some of it later directed at her through slashed tires and death threats—to protect the Columbia River Gorge, one of the nation’s most scenic, historic, and threatened landscapes.

  • Copyright year: 2022
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A History of Oregon Ornithology

From Territorial Days to the Rise of Birding

Oregon State University Press

The study of birds was, in its early years, often driven by passionate amateurs in a localized context. A History of Oregon Ornithology takes readers  from the Lewis and Clark expedition, through the professionalization of the field, and to the mid-twentieth century, focusing on how birding and related amateur field observation grew outside the realms of academia and conservation agencies.
 
Editors Alan Contreras, Vjera Thompson, and Nolan Clements have assembled chapters exploring the differences and interplay between the amateur and professional study of birds, along with discussions of early birding societies, notable observers, and ornithological studies. The book includes chapters on such significant ornithologists as Charles Bendire, William L. Finley, Ira Gabrielson, Stanley Jewett, and David B. Marshall. It also notes the sometimes-overlooked contributions of women to our expanding knowledge of western birds. Special attention is paid to the development of seabird observation, the impact of the Internet, and the rise of digital resources for bird observers.
 
Intended for readers interested in the history of Oregon, scientific explorations in the West, and the origins of modern birding and field ornithology, A History of Oregon Ornithology offers a detailed and entertaining account of the study of birds in the Pacific Northwest.

 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Studies in Outdoor Recreation

Search and Research for Satisfaction

Oregon State University Press

Studies in Outdoor Recreation is a standard text in courses on parks and outdoor recreation, a guide to the scholarly literature for graduate students and researchers, and a reference book for managers and practitioners. The first book to review the social science literature on outdoor recreation, it examines studies from this broad, interdisciplinary field, integrates them into coherent chapters on relevant issues and topics, and synthesizes research findings into a body of knowledge. The final chapter presents a series of principles designed to guide park and outdoor recreation research and inform park and wilderness management. The book includes an extensive bibliography of 2,000 references and a guide to the social science literature that leads readers to primary source materials.

This fourth edition is fully updated and revised to reflect current research and new issues in the field, such as the evolving meaning of parks and wilderness, new models of parks, sustainable transportation in outdoor recreation, equitable access to outdoor recreation opportunities, the role of outdoor recreation in physical and mental wellbeing, the effects of climate change on outdoor recreation use and management, and theoretical and empirical issues in outdoor recreation research.

Contributors to the fourth edition include Laura Anderson, Megha Budruk, Kelly Goonan, Jeffrey Hallo, Daniel Laven, Steven Lawson, Rebecca Stanfield McCown, Ben Minteer, Peter Newman, Elizabeth Perry, Peter Pettengill, Nathan Reigner, William Valliere, Carena van Riper, and Xiao Xiao.

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Planning the Portland Urban Growth Boundary

The Struggle to Transform Trend City

Oregon State University Press

In this companion volume to his 2012 book Oregon Plans: The Making of an Unquiet Land-Use Revolution, Sy Adler offers readers a deep analysis of planning Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary. Required by one of Oregon’s nineteen statewide planning goals, a boundary in the Portland metropolitan area was intended to separate urban land and land that would be urbanized from commercially productive farmland. After adopting the goals, approving the Portland growth boundary in 1979 was the most significant decision the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission has ever made, and, more broadly, is a significant milestone in American land-use planning.
 
Planning the Portland Urban Growth Boundary primarily covers the 1970s. Innovative regional planning institutions were established in response to concerns about sprawl, but planners working for those institutions had to confront the reality that various plans being developed and implemented by city and county governments in metro Portland would instead allow sprawl to continue. Regional planners labeled these as “Trend City” plans, and sought to transform them during the 1970s and thereafter.
 
Adler discusses the dynamics of these partially successful efforts and the conflicts that characterized the development of the Portland UGB during the 1970s—between different levels of government, and between public, private, and civic sector advocates. When the regional UGB is periodically reviewed, these conflicts continue, as debates about values and technical issues related to forecasting future amounts of population, economic activity, and the availability of land for urban development over a twenty-year period roil the boundary planning process.
 
Planning the Portland Urban Growth Boundary is an authoritative history and an indispensable resource for anyone actively involved in urban and regional planning—from neighborhood associations and elected officials to organizations working on land use and development issues throughout the state.
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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A Little Bit of Land

Oregon State University Press

From midwifing new lambs to harvesting basil, Jessica Gigot invites readers into rural life and explores the uncommon road that led her there. Fascinated by farming and the burgeoning local food movement, she spent her twenties wandering the Pacific Northwest as a farm intern and eventually a graduate student in horticulture, always with an eye towards learning as much as she could about how and why people farm. Despite numerous setbacks and the many difficulties of growing food, from soggy soil to rambunctious rams, she created a life for herself defined by resilience and a genuine love of nature.
 
In A Little Bit of Land, Gigot explores the intricacies of small-scale agriculture in the Pacific Northwest, the changing role of women in this male-dominated industry, and questions of sustainability, economics, and health in our food system. Gigot alternates between describing the joys and challenges of small farm life and reflecting on her formative experiences outdoors and in classrooms throughout the region—from Ashland in southern Oregon to the Skagit Valley in Washington state. Throughout, she discovers what it means to find roots, start a family, and cultivate contentment in this unique corner of the world.
 
A Little Bit of Land is a moving memoir about falling in love with a place and all its inhabitants.  It will be relished by readers interested in regenerative agriculture, and anyone who is curious about what it means to live off and love the land.
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Dead Wood

The Afterlife of Trees

Oregon State University Press

The west is full of magnificent trees: mighty spruces, towering cedars, and stout firs. We are used to appreciating trees during their glory years, but how often do we consider what happens to a tree when it dies? We’ve all seen driftwood on the beach. But how many people have truly looked at it and appreciated its ecological role?
 
Ellen Wohl has thought about these questions, and In Dead Wood, she takes us through the afterlife of trees, describing the importance of standing and downed dead wood in forests, in rivers, along beaches, in the open ocean, and even at the deepest parts of the seafloor. Downed wood in the forest provides habitat for diverse plants and animals, and the progressive decay of the wood releases nutrients into the soil. Wood in rivers provides critical habitat for stream insects and fish and can accumulate in logjams that divert the river repeatedly across the valley floor, creating a floodplain mosaic that is rich in habitat and biodiversity. Driftwood on the beach helps to stabilize shifting sand, creating habitat for plants and invertebrates. Fish such as tuna congregate at driftwood in the open ocean. As driftwood becomes saturated and sinks to the ocean floor, collections of sunken wood provide habitat and nutrients for deep-sea organisms. Far from being an unsightly form of waste that needs to be cleaned from forests, beaches, and harbors, dead wood is a critical resource for many forms of life.
 
Dead Wood follows the afterlives of three trees: a spruce in the Colorado Rocky Mountains that remains on the floodplain after death; a redcedar in Washington that is gradually transported downstream to the Pacific; and a poplar in the Mackenzie River of Canada that is transported to the Arctic Ocean. With these three trees, Wohl encourages readers to see beyond landscapes, to appreciate the ecological processes that drive rivers and forests and other ecosystems, and demonstrates the ways that the life of an ecosystem carries on even when individual members of that system have died. Readers will discover that trees can have an exceptionally rich afterlife—one tightly interwoven with the lives of humans and ecosystems.
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Native and Ornamental Conifers in the Pacific Northwest

Identification, Botany and Natural History

Oregon State University Press

Most conifer guides available for the Pacific Northwest focus on native species observed in the wild. Native and Ornamental Conifers in the Pacific Northwest presents an integrated perspective for understanding and identifying conifers in any landscape where native and ornamental species grow alongside each other. It is suitable for landscape designers, horticulturalists, arborists, gardeners, environmental scientists, and botanists.

Based on her experiences teaching workshops on conifer identification and cultivation, Elizabeth Price has developed Jargon-free photographic charts, which allow for side-by-side comparison of conifer features and guide the reader to species identification. The charts are detailed enough for specialists yet accessible to amateurs.

The book includes extensive material on the characteristics, botany, and natural history of conifer plant families, genera, and species, all illustrated with original photographs. Research across many disciplines is blended with direct observation and personal experience, creating a book that goes beyond identification and is both rigorous and engaging.

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Portland in Three Centuries

The Place and the People

Oregon State University Press

A compact and comprehensive history of Portland from first European contact to the twenty-first century, Portland in Three Centuries introduces the women and men who have shaped Oregon’s largest city. The expected politicians and business leaders appear, but Carl Abbott also highlights workers and immigrants, union members and dissenters, women at work and in the public realm, artists and activists, and other movers and shakers.  
Incorporating social history and contemporary scholarship in his narrative, Abbott examines current metropolitan character and issues, giving close attention to historical background. He explores the context of opportunities and problems that have helped to shape the rich mosaic that is Portland.  
This revised and updated second edition includes greater attention to the Indigenous peoples of the Portland region, Portland’s communities of color, and the challenges of recent years that have thrust Portland into the national spotlight.

A highly readable character study of a city, and enhanced by more than sixty historic and contemporary images, Portland in Three Centuries will appeal to readers interested in Portland, in Oregon, and in Pacific Northwest history.

 

  • Copyright year: 2011
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Cheese War

Conflict and Courage in Tillamook County, Oregon

Oregon State University Press

In the 1960s, Tillamook County, Oregon, was at war with itself. As the regional dairy industry shifted from small local factories to larger consolidated factories, and as profit margins for milk and cheese collapsed, Tillamook farmers found themselves in a financial crisis that fueled multiple disputes. The ensuing Cheese War included lies and secrets, as well as spies, high emotion, a shoving match, and even a death threat.

On one side of the battle was Beale Dixon, head of Tillamook County Creamery Association. Dixon set up a scheme to offer low-interest, low-collateral loans from TCCA’s largest member cooperative, Tillamook Cheese & Dairy Association, to the supermarkets that stocked Tillamook products. Dixon argued it was a cheap, easy way to ensure good will—and continued purchases—in a tight market. On the other side was George Milne, a respected farmer and board president of the cooperative. Milne supported his board’s decision that loans would require board approval and bank oversight. Dixon mostly ignored those requirements.

The discovery of more financial irregularities soon spiraled  into a community-wide dispute, exacerbated by a complex web of family and business relationships. The Cheese War raged for the better part of a decade across board meetings, courtrooms, and the community itself. While largely unknown outside of Tillamook County, the Cheese War was so divisive that some families remain fractured today.

Sisters Marilyn Milne and Linda Kirk, children of the Cheese War, saw how it absorbed their parents. As adults, they set out to learn more about what had happened. The authors conducted years of research and have integrated it with tales of their experiences as farm kids living through the all-consuming fight. As Americans become ever more interested in food supply chains and ethical consumption, here is the story of the very human factors behind one of Oregon’s most iconic brands.

 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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The Origin and Distribution of Birds in Coastal Alaska and British Columbia

The Lost Manuscript of Ornithologist Harry S. Swarth

Oregon State University Press

At the time of his death in 1935, Harry S. Swarth, head of the Mammalogy and Ornithology Departments at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, had been preparing a manuscript reflecting on twenty-five years of his research in coastal Alaska and British Columbia. “The Distribution and Migrations of Birds in Adjacent Alaska and British Columbia” summarized Swarth’s research, ideas, and conjectures on the bird life in the region, including theories about when and how birds populated this vast territory after the retreat of glaciers near the end of the Pleistocene. Drawing on his field experiences and his forty published scientific papers, Swarth’s manuscript represented state-of-the-art science for the time. And his ideas hold up; his papers are still cited by ornithologists today.

In 2019, Christopher Swarth, Harry’s grandson and a scientist in his own right, discovered the forgotten manuscript. This book includes the original unpublished manuscript, accompanied by contextual essays from contemporary ornithologists who examine the impact and relevance of Swarth’s research on coastal bird diversity, fox sparrow migration, and the systematic puzzle of the timberline sparrow. Expedition maps display field camps and exploration routes, and species checklists illustrate the variety of birds observed at key field sites. To bring additional color and insight, The Origin and Distribution of Birds in Coastal Alaska and British Columbia also includes excerpts from Harry Swarth’s field notes, a comprehensive list of Harry Swarth’s publications, and a glossary with historic and contemporary bird names. Naturalists, ornithologists, birders, and all those who want to learn more about the natural history of the region will delight in the rediscovery of this long-lost treasure.

 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Take Heart

Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers

Oregon State University Press

Earth’s weary lovers are tired, perplexed, and battered from all directions. Their hearts have so often been broken. It’s hard to go on, but it is morally impossible to quit. How do Earth’s protectors find the heart to continue the struggle?

To this question, environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore and Canadian artist Bob Haverluck bring twenty-two life-affirming essays and drawings. Their entwined art offers pluck, stubborn resolve, and even some laughter to those who have for years been working for environmental sanity, social justice, and ecological thriving.

What Moore and Haverluck offer is encouragement to join or keep on with Earth’s work—not distractions, but deep and honest reasons to remember that the struggle matters. Rather than another to-do list or an empty promise of hope, Take Heart is a thank-you gift to the multitudes of Earth’s defenders. Inside its pages, they will find reason to take heart.

Taking heart is not hope exactly, but maybe it’s courage. Not solutions to the planetary crisis, but some modest advice for the inevitable crisis of the heart. A rueful grin, and gratitude to be part of this strange and necessary work for the endangered Earth.
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Children of the Stars

Indigenous Science Education in a Reservation Classroom

Oregon State University Press

In the 1990s, Ed Galindo, a high school science teacher on the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho, took a team of Shoshone-Bannock students first to Johnson Space Center in Texas and then to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. These students had submitted a project to a competitive NASA program that was usually intended for college students—and they earned a spot to see NASA astronauts test out their experiment in space. The students designed and built the project themselves: a system to mix phosphate and water in space to create a fertilizer that would aid explorers in growing food on other planets.

In Children of the Stars, Galindo relates his experience with this first team and with successive student teams, who continued to participate in NASA programs over the course of a decade. He discusses the challenges of teaching American Indian students, from the practical limits of a rural reservation school to the importance of respecting and incorporating Indigenous knowledge systems. In describing how he had to earn the trust of his students to truly be successful as their teacher, Galindo also touches on the complexities of community belonging and understanding; although Indigenous himself, Galindo is not a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes and was still an outsider who had as much to learn as the students.

Children of the Stars is the story of students and a teacher, courage and hope. Written in a conversational style, it’s an accessible story about students who were supported and educated in culturally relevant ways and so overcame the limitations of an underfunded reservation school to reach great heights.

 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Halcyon Journey

In Search of the Belted Kingfisher

By Marina Richie; Illustrated by Ram Papish
Oregon State University Press

More than one hundred species of kingfishers brighten every continent but Antarctica. Not all are fishing birds. They range in size from the African dwarf kingfisher to the laughing kookaburra of Australia. This first book to feature North America’s belted kingfisher is a lyrical story of observation, revelation, and curiosity in the presence of flowing waters.

The kingfisher—also known as the halcyon bird—is linked to the mythic origin of halcyon days, a state of happiness that Marina Richie hopes to find outside her back door in Missoula, Montana. Epiphanies and a citizen science discovery punctuate days tracking a bird that outwits at every turn. The female is more colorful than the male (unusual and puzzling) and the birds’ earthen nest holes are difficult to locate.

While the heart of the drama takes place on Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, the author’s adventures in search of kingfisher kin on the lower Rio Grande, in South Africa, and in London illuminate her relationships with the birds of Montana. In the quiet of winter, she explores tribal stories of the kingfisher as messenger and helper, pivotal qualities for her quest. For all who love birds or simply seek solace in nature, Halcyon Journey is an inviting introduction to the mythic and mysterious belted kingfisher.

 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Gifted Earth

The Ethnobotany of the Quinault and Neighboring Tribes

Oregon State University Press

Published in cooperation with the Quinault Indian Nation

Gifted Earth features traditional Native American plant knowledge, detailing the use of plants for food, medicines, and materials. It presents a rich and living tradition of plant use within the Quinault Indian Nation in a volume collaboratively developed and endorsed by that tribe.

The Quinault Reservation on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state is a diverse tribal community, embodying the traditional knowledge of tribes along the entire Pacific Northwest coast. Its membership consists of descendants of many tribes—from the northwestern Olympic Peninsula to the northern Oregon coast—including the Quinault, but also many others who were relocated to the reservation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Individuals descended from these tribal communities, including Chinook, Chehalis, Hoh, Quileute, Queets, Cowlitz, Tillamook, Clatsop, and others, have contributed to Gifted Earth, giving it remarkable breadth and representation.

A celebration of enduring Native American knowledge, this book will help non-specialists as they discover the potential of the region’s wild plants, learning how to identify, gather, and use many of the plants that they encounter in the Northwestern landscape. Part ethnobotanical guide and part “how-to” manual, Gifted Earth also prepares plant users for the minor hazards and pitfalls that accompany their quest—from how to avoid accidentally eating a bug hidden within a salal berry to how to prevent blisters when peeling the tender stalks of cow parsnip.

As beautiful as it is informative, Gifted Earth sets the standard for a new generation of ethnobotanical guides informed by the values, vision, and voice of Native American communities eager to promote a sustainable, balanced relationship between plant users and the rich plant communities of traditional tribal lands.

 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Shrubs to Know in Pacific Northwest Forests

Oregon State University Press

This full-color, simple-to-use field guide makes shrub identification easy and fun. It features 100 of the most common shrubs that grow in and around Pacific Northwest forests—from southern British Columbia to northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the northern Rockies. It includes an overview of shrub communities in the Pacific Northwest; more than five hundred color photos; individual range maps and complete descriptions for each species; notes on range and habitat, response to disturbance, traditional and current uses, and origin of names; glossary of identification terms; and an easy-to-use, well-tested identification key.

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Bernard Daly's Promise

The Enduring Legacy of a Place-based Scholarship

By Sam Stern; Foreword by Ed Ray
Oregon State University Press

Published in cooperation with the Dr. Daly Project Association

Bernard Daly escaped the Irish Famine and with his family emigrated to America, where he became the town doctor in Lakeview, Oregon, and then a state legislator, Oregon Agricultural College regent, county judge, rancher, and banker. When he died in 1920, his estate, valued at about a million dollars, established a college scholarship for the youth of Lake County, ensuring that most of them could attend college.

It’s hard to imagine a place more distant from higher education than Lake County in south central Oregon, a county about the size of New Jersey with a population under eight thousand. When the Bernard Daly scholarship was first awarded in 1922, less than two percent of America’s youth went to college, and the percentage was even lower in Lake County.

Today, Lake County students are much more likely to go to college, graduate in four years without debt, go on to graduate school, have successful careers, and contribute to the larger community—all because of a scholarship established a hundred years ago by an immigrant who sought a better life, not only for himself but also for others.

Drawing on more than a hundred personal interviews, an extensive web-based survey, and archival materials, Bernard Daly’s Promise offers unique insights into the benefits of higher education and how it might best be supported—questions that we are struggling with today.


 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Willamette River Greenways

Navigating the Currents of Conservation Policy and Practice

Oregon State University Press

The Willamette River Greenway Program, first proposed in 1966 by future Oregon governor Bob Straub, envisioned a nearly two-hundred-mile assemblage of public lands along the Willamette River for public use and environmental protection. While the Greenway Program fell far short of Straub’s original proposal, today it provides for significant riverside lands with a range of public benefits. The Greenway Program also offers a useful lens through which to view the successes and failures of Oregon’s environmental protection policies over the past few decades.

Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper, has spent countless hours paddling the Willamette, becoming familiar with its flora, fauna, and human neighbors. In Willamette River Greenways, he combines personal narrative about his experiences on the river with nuanced consideration of the controversies and challenges of the Greenway Program. Williams sheds light on current land stewardship practices, revealing the institutional and leadership failures that endanger the river’s water quality and habitat, and looks to the program’s future. He also takes readers with him onto the water, sharing what it’s like to travel the river by canoe, paying homage to the river’s natural beauty and the host of wildlife species that call it home.

Part policy analysis, part advocacy, and all love letter to one of Oregon’s great rivers, Willamette River Greenways offers valuable perspective to policymakers, land use managers, and recreational river users alike.

 

  • Copyright year: 2021
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Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest

Oregon State University Press

This publication is supported by a generous grant from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde through their Cultural Resources Publication Sponsorship Program

Instead of discovering a land blanketed by dense forests, early explorers of the Pacific Northwest encountered a varied landscape including open woods, meadows, and prairies. Far from a pristine wilderness, much of the Northwest was actively managed and shaped by the hands of its Native American inhabitants. Their primary tool was fire.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to one of the most important issues concerning Native Americans and their relationship to the land. Over more than 10,000 years, Native Americans in the Northwest learned the intricacies of their local environments and how to use fire to create desired effects, mostly in the quest for food.

Drawing on historical journals, Native American informants, and ethnobotanical and forestry studies, this book’s contributors describe local patterns of fire use in eight ecoregions, representing all parts of the Native Northwest, from southwest Oregon to British Columbia and from Puget Sound to the Northern Rockies. Their essays provide glimpses into a unique understanding of the environment, one that draws on traditional ecological knowledge. Together, these writings also offer historical perspective on the contemporary debate over “prescribed burning” and management of public lands.

This updated edition includes a foreword by Frank K. Lake and a new epilogue by editor Robert T. Boyd. Contributors include Stephen Arno, Stephen Barrett, Theresa Ferguson, David French, Eugene Hunn, Leslie Johnson, Jeff LaLande, Estella Leopold, Henry Lewis, Helen H. Norton, Reg Pullen, William Robbins, John Ross, Nancy Turner, and Richard White.

 

  • Copyright year: 2011
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Astoria

An Oregon History

Oregon State University Press

Before Seattle, before Portland, there was Astoria.

The rest of the country is just beginning to discover Astoria, Oregon, that historic gem of a town at the mouth of the Columbia River west of Portland, and the oldest European-American settlement west of the Rockies.

The author provides a chronological look dating back to the 1500s, including European exploration, Native American life, logging, fishing, Chinese laborers in the salmon industry, a giant cheese in the Civil War, Oregon’s first female surgeon, Victorian architecture, and valiant Coast Guard rescues.

Published by Rivertide Publishing and distributed by Oregon State University Press

  • Copyright year: 2021
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A Tidal Odyssey

Ed Ricketts and the Making of Between Pacific Tides

Oregon State University Press

Between Pacific Tides by Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin is arguably the most important book about marine ecology on the Pacific coast of North America. At a time when almost all studies of life in the intertidal zones were taxonomic, Ricketts and Calvin revolutionized the field and helped to lay the groundwork for studies of the impact of environmental change on the natural world. Though Ricketts is perhaps best known as a quirky character in John Steinbeck’s fiction, he was a serious marine biologist who conducted pioneering research.

In A Tidal Odyssey, literary scholar Richard Astro and archivist Donald Kohrs explore how Between Pacific Tides came to be, covering both the writing process and the long journey to publication. They tell three interwoven stories: the development of ecology as a valuable new approach to the study of marine life in the intertidal zone; a case study of how new and dynamic science is published and reaches a larger audience; and the intellectual development of Ed Ricketts.

Not only a scientist but also an expert in music, philosophy, history, and literature, Ricketts and his work impacted a broad range of writers and scholars. A number of these intellectual figures appear in A Tidal Odyssey, including Ricketts’s co-author, Jack Calvin, and illustrator, Ritch Lovejoy; mythologist Joseph Campbell; novelist Henry Miller; composer John Cage; and of course John Steinbeck. The authors have drawn extensively from Ricketts’s archive, including previously unpublished letters, memoranda, notebooks, and photographs.

A Tidal Odyssey is for anyone interested in the world of Ed Ricketts as well as marine biology, intertidal ecology, and how ecological studies underpin our understanding of the impact of environmental change on the well-being of our planet.

  • Copyright year: 2021
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White Poplar, Black Locust

Oregon State University Press

Growing up in one of the West’s last company lumber towns, a small community called Hilt on the California-Oregon border, Louise Wagenknecht witnessed the dying years of a unique way of life. The lumber boom of the 1950s and 1960s would devastate the ancient old-growth forests of the Klamath Mountains as well as the people of Hilt, whose lives were inextricably tied to the company lumber mill. White Poplar, Black Locust is the story of that transformation, but it is also something more—a noteworthy addition to the literature of place, and a sensitive and richly textured family memoir. As Wagenknecht unravels the threads that still bind her to both Hilt’s history and her own, unforgettable characters emerge, and what should have been the happy ending to this story, the marriage of her divorced mother to a forester working for the Fruit Growers Supply Company, becomes instead the end of childhood innocence, foretelling the demise of the mill and the end of Hilt itself.

Originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003, this first book in Louise Wagenknecht’s trilogy about life in the Klamath Mountains is now available through Oregon State University Press, together with Light on the Devils (2011) and Shadows on the Klamath (2021).

  • Copyright year: 2021
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