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.
The Environmental Justice
William O. Douglass and American Conservation
Living with Bugs
Least-Toxic Solutions to Everyday Bug Problems
Handbook of Oregon Birds
A Field Companion to Birds of Oregon
Davis Country
H.L. Davis's Northwest
Massacred for Gold
The Chinese in Hells Canyon
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.
Refusing War, Affirming Peace
The History of Civilian Public Service Camp #21 at Cascade Locks
River Basins of the American West
A High Country News Reader
Oregon Fossils, Second Edition
Race and Science
Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America
The U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest
A History
Another Way the River Has
Taut True Tales from the Northwest
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.
A Force for Change
Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936
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.
The Lumberman's Frontier
Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America's Forests
A River Without Banks
Place and Belonging in the Inland Northwest
To the Woods
Sinking Roots, Living Lightly, and Finding True Home
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.
Reflections of a Pragmatic Economist
My Intellectual Journey
No Small Potatoes
How a Family Potato Salad Recipe is Fast Becoming a Billion Dollar Business
Discovering Main Street
Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest
A unique guidebook to exploring small towns, “the last frontier of American tourism."
Remembering the Power of Words
The Life of an Oregon Activist, Legislator, and Community Leader
Thunder Tree
Lessons from an Urban Wildland
Dragonflies and Damselflies of Oregon
A Field Guide
Pathfinder
Blazing a New Wilderness Trail in Modern America
Pacific Northwest Trail founder Ron Strickland shares his stories about and from the trail.
Toward One Oregon
Rural-Urban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State
Life Histories of Cascadia Butterflies
The first book to present the life histories of the entire butterfly fauna of a North American geographic region.
Wading for Bugs
Exploring Streams with the Experts
Field stories from aquatic biologists that reveal what it’s like to study stream insects and to make discoveries that could help stream health and conservation.
Wild in the City
Exploring the Intertwine: The Portland-Vancouver Region's Network of Parks, Trails, and Natural Areas
Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600
Finding the River
An Environmental History of the Elwha
Oregon Plans
The Making of an Unquiet Land Use Revolution
Public Lands, Public Debates
A Century of Controversy
Nineteen essays from an environmental historian that explore the U.S. system of public lands, the subject of historical struggle and contemporary debate.