Seattle and King County Timeline: A Chronological Guide to Seattle and King County's First 150 Years

by Walt Crowley

This lively overview of Seattle and King County history traces the region's development since the arrival of the first white settlers in 1851. Original essays by historian Walt Crowley highlight each decade, complemented by vignettes, biographies, and chronologies based on the extensive files of www.historylink.org, the nation's first online encyclopaedia of community history written for the Internet, and some 200 historical images curated by Paul...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0295981652
• ISBN13: 9780295981659
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: University of Washington Press and Historylin
• Length: 93 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Seattle and how it got that way

Walt Crowley and his gang at historylink.org provide a valuable service to anyone interested in the history of Seattle, King County, and western Washington generally. While this book is necessarily less comprehensive (and less easily searched and updated) than the online version, it's still an interesting and informative browse-through for Emerald City residents and a good introduction to the greater wealth on their web site.This small title's pages are packed with colorful illustrations and punchy copy. It probably works better to open and read it at random than to try to follow it systematically from page to page, because while it's basically organized chronologically, there are so many sections, subheads, and sidebars -- plus the timeline itself on nearly every page -- that trying to keep it all straight could get maddening. It's much more fun simply to open a page and read about why Seattle's streets aren't aligned north and south of Yesler Way, what happened to the communities known as Squack and Slaughter (they're still here, under different names) and why there were as many arguments about light rail 50 years ago as there are today.On the whole, any Washington resident with an interest in this city would probably find something entertaining or worthwhile to justify browsing this title. Gene Logsdon writes that one of the ways to avoid provincialism is to know your own province really well. This book is one useful way for Seattleites to do that.

A beautiful book

(...)This compact volume is chock full of interesting information, some of which has never appeared in other histories of Seattle. It is readable, very attractive, and includes mention of the September 11 attacks and other recent events. Some of the new stories include Pioneer Henry Yesler's Native American family, the early smallpox epidemics that decimated the local tribes, the last several decades of the 20th Century, Ivar Haglund, and the arrival of the Buffalo Soldiers. I'm buying several as gifts.