NCW Libraries

In the tradition of Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America or Aldo Leopold, Brenda Peterson tells the 300-year history of wild wolves in America. It is also our own history, seen through our relationship with wolves. The earliest Americans revered them. Settlers zealously exterminated them. Now, scientists, writers, and ordinary citizens are fighting to bring them back to the wild. Peterson, an eloquent voice in the battle for twenty years, makes...

The acclaimed author offers reminiscences of her childhood growing up on a farm in Portland, recalling experiences at home and at school, her special friends, her relationship with her mother, and her discovery of the wonder of books.

Featuring the men and women who lived and worked at Grand Coulee in the wake of the Great Depression and the Native people whose lives were changed alongside historians and engineers, the film explores how the tension between technological achievement and environmental impact hangs over the project's legacy.

To celebrate Oregon's 150th birthday, the Oregon Library Association has chosen one book for all Oregonians to read: Stubborn Twig. Lauren Kessler's award-winning book, the selection for the statewide Oregon Reads program, is a classic story of immigrants making their way in a new land. It is a living work of social history that rings with the power of truth and the drama of fiction, a moving saga about the challenges of becoming an American. Masuo...

An introduction to the geography, history, government, politics, economy, resources, people, and culture of Washington, including maps, charts, and a recipe.

Dee Brown's fascinating history of women on America's western frontier "Who was the western Woman? What was she like, this gentle yet persistent tamer of the wild land that was the American West?" These are questions that Dee Brown, author of the bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, sets out to answer in this spirited work of social history. He outlines the many types of female pioneers: housewives to rebels, schoolteachers to saloon women....

"Edward Curtis was dashing, charismatic, a passionate mountaineer, a famous photographer--the Annie Liebowitz of his time. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his great idea: He would try to capture on film the Native American nation before it disappeared. At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, Egan's book tells the remarkable untold story behind Curtis's iconic photographs,...

"The skeleton known as Kennewick Man was discovered in 1966 by two young men along the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. When the skeleton was brought to Jim Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, Chatters first believed that the remains were those of a nineteenth-century pioneer. He was astonished when radiocarbon dating revealed the skeleton to be approximately 9,500 years old, making it one of the oldest skeletons ever found in North America....