Seattle from the Margins
Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Washington Press
Published:20th Sep '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The creation of Seattle and the displacement of those who built it
From the origins of the city in the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II, Seattle's urban workforce consisted overwhelmingly of migrant laborers who powered the seasonal, extractive economy of the Pacific Northwest. Though the city benefitted from this mobile labor force—consisting largely of Indigenous peoples and Asian migrants—municipal authorities, elites, and reformers continually depicted these workers and the spaces they inhabited as troublesome and as impediments to urban progress. Today the physical landscape bears little evidence of their historical presence in the city.
Tracing histories from unheralded sites such as labor camps, lumber towns, lodging houses, and so-called slums, Seattle from the Margins shows how migrant laborers worked alongside each other, competed over jobs, and forged unexpected alliances within the marine and coastal spaces of the Puget Sound. By uncovering the historical presence of marginalized groups and asserting their significance in the development of the city, Megan Asaka offers a deeper understanding of Seattle's complex past.
Seattle from the Margins was made possible in part by a grant from 4Culture's Heritage Program.
"One of the strengths of Asaka's book is the way it writes "history from below," digging up information about ordinary, struggling, marginalized people who don't leave records or interest standard historians. The result is a book that is full of insights, characters, and new story lines...This brave book is well-written and bracing."
(Post Alley)"Asaka deftly foregrounds the experiences of transient and surveilled workers to tell the story of Seattle's intercultural commerce and communities. [Her] tour de force offers lessons and strategies for local mobilization today."
(The Stranger)"Asaka's book provides a model for how to examine other cities in our collective work to address structural racism in the U.S."
(Pacific Northwest Quarterly (PNQ))"[An] instant classic. . . . Stunningly original in the way she mines elusive sources, Asaka's exhaustive research demonstrates the persistent thorniness of telling "histories from below" due to archival preferences for elite and middle-class stories."
(Western Historical Quarterly)"[W]ell-researched, compelling, and much-needed . . . In this thought-provoking study, Asaka weaves together urban and rural sites as well as numerous minoritized communities to outline both Seattle's uniqueness and its important place in the larger history of urban development in the United States. In doing so, Asaka successfully pushes against dominant narratives of U.S. urban history that obscure the relevance of Seattle and of the Pacific Northwest more broadly. Seattle from the Margins is an invaluable addition to Pacific Northwest history, immigration history, and the history of urban development in the United States."
(Pacific Historical RevISBN: 9780295750675
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm
Weight: 544g
277 pages