In 2000, the city of Seattle began an ambitious project to survey and inventory historic resources across the entire municipality. The last such project took place in 1979 and taken together, these efforts offer excellent documentation of the built environment. The database here includes over 5,000 properties and visitors can search through the entire collection by address, parcel number, property...
This fine photographic archive serves as both a great repository of visual historical documentation of the King County area (which includes Seattle) in the state of Washington, as a good example of a collaborative partnership between various organizations. The partnership includes bringing together the visual collections of ten small historical organizations in tandem with the University of...
Gary Greaves was a researcher who interviewed hundreds of people around Seattle in the late 1980s and 1990s. He went around the city and talked to the homeless, citizen activists, and many others. Regrettably, he passed away in 2009 before he could compile all of these observations into the book he was working on. This digital collection from the University of Washington Special Collections...
The staff of the Seattle Municipal Archives have created a Web site that facilitates the work of amateur and professional historians (along with satisfying the curiosity of the general public) seeking to utilize their archival holdings. A quick reference area allows visitors to obtain information about historical election results and some basic facts about Seattle, as well as read their in-house...
First published in the Scout Report on 06-07-2013, we feel this resource still provides an interesting glimpse into the past of the Emerald City.
If you enjoy the Pacific Northwest, you have probably encountered many tales of Seattle's storied past. It is, after all, known in some parts as the "Emerald City," and is full of tales of its rough-and-tumble Skid Row, pioneer settlers from...
It seems that many acts of destruction (human or otherwise) seem to acquire the seemingly inappropriate prefix of “great”, and the tremendous fire that swept through Seattle on June 6, 1889 is no exception. Like the fires that consumed other cities such as Chicago and London, the Great Seattle Fire was the cumulative product of a number of factors working in the favor of such an incendiary blaze....
Many cities struggled with the issue of open housing in the 1950s and 1960s, and Seattle was a contested site in the struggle for civil rights. Until 1968, it was legal to discriminate against minorities in Seattle when renting apartments or selling real estate. This fine website created by the Seattle Municipal Archives explores the history of the open housing campaign through a range of primary...
The Seattle Public Library has been embarking on some ambitious projects as of late and this oral history initiative is one of the best. Working with students in the University of Washington Museology Graduate Program, a number of oral history interviews were conducted with residents, businesspeople, and others in the city's University District. All of the interviews were conducted in 2011 and...
Once again, the University of Washington Digital Collections group has gone above and beyond the call of digital collection duty and service with this small, yet very satisfying, collection. This particular collection brings together 23 compelling short films that include home movies from the Seattle World's Fair in 1962, aerial views of the University campus in the post-World War II period, and...
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