FLICKER AND TAD: A MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY FROM PARADISE COVE, VASHON ISLAND, WASHINGTON

May 11, 2023 Secretary of State's Office

In celebration of Mother’s Day, Washington Rural Heritage is looking back on a fascinating document from the Vashon Island Heritage Collection: a lovingly detailed scrapbook compiled by Florence “Flicker” Burd for her daughter Florence “Tad” Burd. Documenting their life from 1923 to 1927, the scrapbook documents the mother and daughter’s journey from Michigan to Seattle by rail when Tad was just four and Florence a recently separated single mother. Upon arriving in the Pacific Northwest, they spent several months at…

Read More Read More

Books by regional authors selected to represent Washington state at the 2022 National Book Festival

July 27, 2022 Secretary of State's Office

“The Last Cuentista” and “Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk” chosen for the National Center for the Book’s Great Reads from Great Places program The Washington Center for the Book has selected one youth book and one adult book by Washington authors to represent the state at the 2022 National Book Festival: “The Last Cuentista” by Donna Barba Higuera and “Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk” by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe. Both titles…

Read More Read More

Washington Digital Newspapers Collection Exceeds Half a Million Pages!

May 11, 2022 Secretary of State's Office

Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, recently wrapped up several large digitization projects and achieved some significant milestones that expanded its Washington Digital Newspapers (WDN) online collection to over 500,000 newspaper pages. The WDN program selects historic newspapers, prepares them for online searching, and hosts them on the Library’s WDN website as a free public resource. Visitors to the website will find Washington newspapers from the state’s territorial days through the early 2000s,…

Read More Read More

Collage of images from Irwin Nash Migrant Labor Collection. Top row, left to right: Guadalupe Gamboa, left, and Michael Fox clasping hands in a victory pose. Their hands are above a No Trespassing sign on Rogers Walla Walla labor camp. Walla Walla, WA, 1971; Farm workers harvesting hops near Granger, WA in the summer of 1971; Cesar Chavez wearing a checkered shirt with a windbreaker over it and a microphone clipped to his shirt. He is sitting in a cushioned chair for an interview at a TV station. Bottom row, left to right: The exterior of a cafe called the "El Paso Cafe."; Martina Molina Gamboa standing on a porch. Sunnyside, WA, 1971; Someone marching on a sidewalk in front of businesses in Granger, WA. They are carrying a sign that reads "Zapata for mayor".

IRWIN NASH PHOTOGRAPHS OF YAKIMA VALLEY MIGRANT LABOR COLLECTION: DOCUMENTING THE LIVES OF THE LATINX COMMUNITY IN YAKIMA VALLEY

June 28, 2021 Secretary of State's Office

Since 2007, Washington State Library has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to numerous public, academic, tribal, and special libraries statewide. The grants enable these libraries — often in cooperation with local museums, historical societies, community organizations, and private individuals — to digitize historically significant photographs, documents, and artifacts in order to preserve them and make them accessible to people all over the world. In 2020, Washington State University’s (WSU) Holland/Terrell Libraries received a Washington Digital Heritage Grant…

Read More Read More

In the time of COVID-19, AskWA

March 27, 2020 Secretary of State's Office

AskWA is the Statewide Virtual Reference Cooperative — a team of over 50 academic and public libraries across our state who band together to help provide email and 24/7 chat reference services with the help of a global network of librarians. Never has there been a more relevant time for virtual reference services for library users across our state and our globe, as in person reference services have become impossible due to health and safety concerns. Though many AskWA librarians…

Read More Read More

In memoriam: Sid McAlpin, State Archivist from 1963-1994

February 7, 2020 Secretary of State's Office

It is with a heavy heart that we share the news of the passing of Sid McAlpin, State Archivist from 1963 to 1994. To those who worked in the Washington State Archives in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Sid was not only a leader, but also a friend and mentor. Sid’s work as State Archivist was significant and extensive. The following are only some of his many great accomplishments and contributions. Moved the Records Committees from Destruction to Records Retention…

Read More Read More

Excerpt from Stevens County 1966 Special Census

History Friday: Stevens County 1966 Special Census

February 5, 2020 Secretary of State's Office

The 18th United States Census, conducted in 1960, was the first U.S. Census in which the questionnaires were mailed to households, as opposed to paid, in-person enumerators who visited each house. Previous census enumerations used mail-in questionnaires in a limited way, but the 1960 Census relied very heavily on self-reporting. The census determined the U.S. population was 179,323,175. Over the next six years, however, there were many challenges to the census from communities which felt they were under-counted, and short-changed…

Read More Read More

History Friday: The King of Puget Sound Bootleggers

January 16, 2020 Secretary of State's Office

On a crisp March morning in 1920, Seattle Police Lieutenant Roy Olmstead and his colleague, Sergeant T.J. Clark, treaded the dock at Edmonds’ Meadowdale Marine in the caliginous hours leading dawn. A crew of nine bootleggers hauled a rum-running boat’s capacity of Canadian whiskey to six nearby trucks, prepared to furnish Seattle with the contraband in the wake of Prohibition’s inception. Lt. Olmstead and Sgt. Clark had a watchful eye on the operation, but they were not there to arrest…

Read More Read More

Giving New voice to Thomas Handforth, a Northwest artist with global perspective

November 13, 2019 Secretary of State's Office

With grant support from the Washington State Library, the Tacoma Public Library (TPL) recently completed a year-long digitization project to preserve and share the work of artist Thomas Handforth (1897-1948). Best known for his children’s book Mei Li, which won the 1939 Caldecott Medal for illustration, Handforth was born in Tacoma, and studied art at the University of Washington. Some of his early etchings and anatomical drawings stem from when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1918, serving in…

Read More Read More

Building Community with Book Clubs

October 24, 2019 Secretary of State's Office

WSL Community Outreach Librarian, Sara Peté, recently took part in a panel on “Building Community with Book Clubs” at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s annual tradeshow — an event that brings hundreds of book industry professionals together. Davina Morgan-Witts of BookBrowse and sweet pea Flaherty of King’s Books Tacoma shared their extensive knowledge on the wide, and sometimes wild, world of book clubs. Morgan-Witts co-authored the 56 page report “The Inner Lives of Book Clubs” and Flaherty coordinates over a…

Read More Read More

From Our Corner

Washington Secretary of State Blog

Browsed by
Category: Uncategorized