|
|
|
REVIEWS
TERRA NORTHWEST: INTERPRETING PEOPLE AND PLACE
|
by David H. Stratton
|
| Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2007. Notes. 208 pages. $21.95 paper. |
| Terra Northwest is another useful spin-off of the Pettyjohn Distinguished Lecture Series that Washington State University hosted for several years. The public presentations were almost always top flight and well attended by a general audience drawn mainly from the Pullman-Moscow and Spokane areas. I came away from the several presentations I attended with the sense of having learned something valuable from a variety of capable, and usually nationally noted, speakers. I am certain that the series' benefactor, the late Margaret Pettyjohn of Walla Walla, would have been exceedingly pleased with the public lectures and the several anthologies that have resulted from them. |
1
|
|
David Stratton reported that the lecture series has now been discontinued but did not explain the reasons why in his otherwise excellent introduction. Perhaps attendance fell off, or the selection committee at Washington State University believed that it had exhausted the list of worthwhile speakers on the subject of Pacific Northwest history. In retrospect, as Stratton explains, the series was a serendipitous gift to everyone interested in the Pacific Northwest's past. |
2
|
|
Terra Northwest is an anthology that includes David Stratton's concise introduction, nine public presentations now preserved forever as essays, and two back-of-the-book essays that were never vetted before as Pettyjohn lectures. Perhaps the thinking was that these latter two essays were needed to round out the scope of the presentations or to give Terra Northwest respectable physical heft. Both seem rather lightweight compared to the nine Pettyjohn presentations. One of the add-ons is by E. Mark Moreno, on Mexican American street gangs in Yakima; the other, by Sue Armitage, presents a case for reworking the history of the Pacific Northwest primarily into social history ("race, gender, and class"). Yet, even as Armitage admits here, students in Pacific Northwest history classes may find the re-cast subject matter less than stimulating. My more than thirty years of classroom experience taught me that students most enjoyed hearing about Pacific Northwesterners, men and women, who had somehow made a difference in the region's history. I personally fear that the big job of converting textbooks and classroom presentations into a subset of social history (and all the social analysis that entails) is a recipe for terminal boredom. |
3
|
|
One thing that Armitage apparently does not value as social history is the use of historical photographs and other illustrative material to present such history (including statistics) in a compelling way. In fairness, I should add that, to my knowledge, every Pettyjohn speaker, with the notable exceptions of John Reps and William Goetzmann, sidestepped the issue of using visual texts to illuminate the historical record. Looking back, it seems that the lack of attention to visual texts by most Pettyjohn speakers is striking, but perhaps it also simply mirrored the general lack of interest by historians and other speakers in such materials. In the tradition of the Pettyjohn lecture series, there are no illustrations in Terra Northwest, but I sense that Pacific Northwest history in the classroom has generally grown livelier visually, as historians have had to adapt their teaching styles to students who were clearly raised as the audio-visual generation. |
4
|
|
Among the Pettyjohn speakers included in Stratton's anthology are nationally renowned historians such as David J. Weber, Donald Worster, Howard R. Lamar, and Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who respectively gave presentations on the early Spanish Northwest, the development myth in Canada and the United States, statehood as the symbol of a new era, and Indians and freedom of religion. Eminent Northwest journalist and publisher John McClelland, Jr., illuminated the issues associated with Washington becoming a territory in 1853, while Justice James M. Dolliver of the Washington State Supreme Court took a close look at the Washington constitution of 1889. One of the most far reaching essays in the entire Pettyjohn series was the examination by Canadian historian Kenneth S. Coates of the Pacific Northwest within the context of world history. The University of Washington's Bullitt Professor of American History, Quintard Taylor, examined African American migration to the Pacific Northwest during the war decade of 1940–1950. Among my all-time favorite presentations reproduced here was the first-hand account by Gordon Hirabayashi of his growing up during the difficult World War II years of Japanese American relocation on the Pacific Coast. Hirabayashi resisted, and thus his surname is forever linked with the important case decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1943 as Hirabayashi v. United States. |
5
|
|
Stratton also made a major contribution to this anthology. Not only did he write a brief but comprehensive introductory essay placing Margaret Pettyjohn's legacy in historical perspective, but he also wrote a thoughtful introduction to each of the essays included. Stratton, a retired professor of history at Washington State University, deserves recognition for his personal devotion to Pacific Northwest history as illustrated by his making anthologies such as Terra Northwest valuable amplifications of the public lecture series held on the Pullman campus. Terra Northwest concludes with a series of compact biographies of the presenters and essayists. Each essay ends with a useful set of notes, suggestions for further reading, or both. Stratton's book thus represents a valuable addition to the Pacific Northwest bookshelf. |
6
|
|
|
| Carlos Schwantes
|
| Manchester, Missouri |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|