"Four scholars draw from oral histories to focus on experiences of non-white groups such as the Wanapum, Chinese immigrants, interned Japanese Americans, and African American migrant workers, whose lives were deeply impacted by the Hanford Site. Each group resisted segregation and discrimination, and in the process, challenged the region's dominant racial norms"-- Provided by publisher

x, 261 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.

Euro-American Priest River Valley settlers turned acres of sagebrush into fruit orchards. Although farm life required hard work and modern conveniences were often spare, many former residents remember idyllic, close-knit communities where neighbors helped neighbors. Then, in 1943, families received forced evacuation notices. "Fruit farmers had to leave their crops on their trees. And that was very hard on them, no future, no money...they moved wherever they could get a place to live," Catherine Finley recalled. Some were given just thirty days, and Manhattan Project restrictions meant they could not return. Drawn from Hanford History Project personal narratives, Nowhere to Remember highlights life in Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland--three small agricultural communities in eastern Washington's mid-Columbia region. It covers their late 1800s to early 1900s origins, settlement and development, the arrival of irrigation, dependence on railroads, Great Depression struggles, and finally, their unique experiences in the early years of World War II. David W. Harvey examines the impact of wagon trade, steamships, and railroads, grounding local history within the context of American West history. Robert Franklin details the tight bonds between early residents as they labored to transform scrubland into an agricultural Eden. Laura Arata considers the early twentieth century experiences of women who lived and worked in the region. Robert Bauman utilizes oral histories to tell forced removal stories. Finally, Bauman and Franklin convey displaced occupants' reactions to their lost spaces and places of meaning--and explore ways they sought to honor their heritage.

xvi,196 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 23 cm

"The Hanford Reach is the last free stretch of the river between the McNary and Priest Rapids Dams, a place boasting a varied landscape of floodplains, wetlands, deserts, orchards - and nuclear reactors." "This is not a place that people think to visit. Known primarily for hosting the country's most toxic nuclear outpost, it is public land that barely exists in public consciousness. But because the Reach has been posted off-limits by the military since 1943, this book offers readers a little-seen glimpse into what the Pacific Northwest's arid east was like before the postwar boom." "Zwinger's text, enhanced by Skip Smith's photos, captures the subtleties of the contrasting vistas, just as it makes clear the depth of the radioactive poisoning within the soil and wildlife."--BOOK JACKET

xii, 79 pages : illustrations ; 17 cm.

From back This book, Tales of Richland, White Bluffs and Hanford, tells the story of these three towns before there was an atomic project. They were farming communities, rich in a wide variety of early bearing fruit, and with a long growing season for vegetables, feed grains and alfalfa hay. The author lived in Richland from 1932 to 1941. Her mother's family, the Charles Sawyers, came to the Fruitvale District in 1909. The Sawyers had a 19-acre farm just upriver from where the Graduate Center is at present (1986), north of Richland's Hanford School. Mrs Parker has a deep interest in Northwest history and has written two other books, Kin-i-wak, Kenewick, Tehe, Kennewick, and Washington, Oregon; a Map History of the Oregon Country. She is also an amateur archaeologist and is actively interested in Geology and Genealogy.

407 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm

iv, 155 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 22 cm

Authored in 1919 by Whitman College professor William Denison Lyman, History of the Yakima Valley, Washington is an expansive, subscription-based chronicle detailing the rapid agricultural and industrial transformation of the region's arid interior. The multi-volume text traces the development of Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton counties, emphasizing the shift from the violent frontier conflicts of the Yakima War to the systematic implementation of massive irrigation projects that turned sagebrush plains into highly profitable orchards. Heavily subsidized by the inclusion of flattering biographical sketches of prominent local ranchers, politicians, and businessmen, the work serves as a triumphant civic monument celebrating Anglo-American engineering and agrarian capitalism. A keen insight drawn from the work is how the narrative weaponizes the rhetoric of ecological transformation to justify colonial occupation; by framing the irrigation and agricultural cultivation of the valley as the heroic redemption of a "useless" desert, Lyman’s text morally validates the dispossession of the Yakama Nation by equating legitimate land ownership exclusively with capitalist, industrial-scale agricultural productivity.

2 volumes : illustrations, portraits ; 27 cm