University Of Washington Press imprint: 536 books
The Scholar and the State
Fiction as Political Discourse in Late Imperial China
Language: English
Release Date: February 26, 2015
In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power and moral legitimacy, but changing social and political circumstances...
Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor
A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Story Collection
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2017
Written around 1660, the unique Chinese short story collection Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (Doupeng xianhua), by the author known only as Aina the Layman, uses the seemingly innocuous setting of neighbors swapping yarns on hot summer days under a shady arbor to create a series of stories that embody...
A Life Disturbed
My Pacific War Revisited
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2011
An exceptional storyteller with an analytical eye, Merrel Clubb has gathered the letters he sent his parents from the Pacific Theater of World War II and his subsequent reflections on that war and on his life into a kind of then-and-now memoir. The letters are a treasure trove of humor, anxiety, and...
Car Country
An Environmental History
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2013
For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country�a nation dominated by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often unsafe to navigate by those who are not...
The Tao of Raven
An Alaska Native Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2017
In her first book, Blonde Indian, Ernestine Hayes powerfully recounted the story of returning to Juneau and to her Tlingit home after many years of wandering. The Tao of Raven takes up the next and, in some ways, less explored question: once the exile returns, then what?
Using the story of...
On the Margins of Tibet
Cultural Survival on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2011
The state of Tibetan culture within contemporary China is a highly politicized topic on which reliable information is rare. But what is Tibetan culture and how should it be developed or preserved? The Chinese authorities and the Tibetans in exile present conflicting views on almost every aspect of...
California through Native Eyes
Reclaiming History
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2016
Most California histories begin with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century and conveniently skip to the Gold Rush of 1849. Noticeably absent from these stories are the perspectives and experiences of the people who lived on the land long before European settlers arrived....
In Pursuit of Alaska
An Anthology of Travelers' Tales, 1879-1909
Language: English
Release Date: July 28, 2013
This collection of Alaskan adventures begins with a newspaper article written by John Muir during his first visit to Alaska in 1879, when the sole U.S. government representative in all the territory's 586,412 square miles was a lone customs official in Sitka. It closes with accounts of the gold rush...
Frontier Livelihoods
Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands
Language: English
Release Date: June 8, 2015
Do ethnic minorities have the power to alter the course of their fortune when living within a socialist state? In Frontier Livelihoods, the authors focus their study on the Hmong - known in China as the Miao - in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, contending that individuals and households create livelihoods...
Irrigated Eden
The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West
Language: English
Release Date: November 23, 2009
Irrigation came to the arid West in a wave of optimism about the power of water to make the desert bloom. Mark Fiege�s fascinating and innovative study of irrigation in southern Idaho�s Snake River valley describes a complex interplay of human and natural systems. Using vast quantities of labor,...
Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence
Coming Home to Hood River
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2012
Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence is a compelling story of courage, community, endurance, and reparation. It shares the experiences of Japanese Americans (Nisei) who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, fighting on the front lines in Italy and France, serving as linguists in the South Pacific,...
by Justin M. Jacobs
Language: English
Release Date: April 18, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: April 18, 2016
Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State views modern Chinese political history from the perspective of Han officials who were tasked with governing Xinjiang. This region, inhabited by Uighurs, Kazaks, Hui, Mongols, Kirgiz, and Tajiks, is also the last significant “colony” of the former Qing empire...
Warnings against Myself
Meditations on a Life in Climbing
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2016
From his youthful second ascent of the north ridge of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon�s Saint Elias Range, an in-and-out on skis for which he had not entirely learned how to ski, to a recent excursion across the Harding Icefield conceived under the influence of rain and whiskey, David Stevenson chronicles...
Uplake
Restless Essays of Coming and Going
Language: English
Release Date: March 12, 2018
For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You�re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people�s...