Junius Rochester, whose family has shaped the city for many generations, is an award-winning Northwest historian and author of numerous books about Seattle and other places.
As the Grange grew, it pushed successfully for political reform, such as doubling legal immigration for undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, providing labor for rural areas.
In 1945, following the Second World War, and when anti-Soviet feeling in the U.S. was burgeoning, a young man from Seattle named Eugene Dennis succeeded Earl Browder as leader of the U.S. Communist Party.
Seattleite Bob Reed and his former comrades-in-arms keep the memory alive of those bittersweet days through “VALB and Friends,” – Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Staged by the famous Seattle showman John Cort, the opera about Narcissa and Marcus Whitman ran for 12 Seattle performances at the Moore Theatre in 1912.
The goateed, wiry artist became an amateur pianist and composer, wrote prose and poetry, and enjoyed an insatiable appetite for film, science, concerts, travel, and the theater.
While Americans listened to a new invention called the radio, and watched another called moving pictures, Doc Hamilton and many others opened subterranean, out-of-the way, private night clubs called “speakeasies.”
The Centralia Massacre in 1919 and the Seattle General Strike the same year were examples of radical Wobbly activity in America and the timberland Northwest.