In this provocative and illuminating book, Marianna Torgovnick explores the psychology of our profound attraction to cultures we call "primitive." Whether located in Africa, the South Pacific, or the American Southwest, the primitive has become synonymous in the Western imagination with a range of emotions and experiences thought to be lost in modern life: reverence for the land and for nature; strong communal bonds; sexual plentitude; and, perhaps most intriguing, and ecstatic sense of connection to the universe and the life force. Torgovnick investigates the numerous ways we have turned toward the primitive out of spiritual hunger for such deeply human experiences - a hunger that could once be satisfied within the West's own mystical traditions but that often no longer can be. Brilliantly encompassing religion, art, psychology, literature, and other aspects of our culture, Primitive Passions offers new insight into our ideas of spirituality and gender, and, ultimately, into the hidden but vital parts of ourselves.

In the Puget Sound region of Washington state, indigenous peoples and their descendants have a long history of interaction with settlers and their descendants. Indians in the Making offers the first comprehensive account of these interactions, from contact with traders of the 1820s to the Indian fishing rights activism of the 1970s. In this thoroughly researched history, Alexandra Harmon also provides a theoretically sophisticated analysis that charts shifting notions of Indian identity, both in native and in nonnative communities. During the period under consideration, each major shift in demographic, economic, and political conditions precipitated new deliberations about how to distinguish Indians from non-Indians and from each other. By chronicling such dialogues over 150 years, this groundbreaking study reveals that Indian identity has a complex history. Examining relations in various spheres of life—labor, public ceremony, marriage and kinship, politics and law—Harmon shows how Indians have continually redefined themselves. Her focus on the negotiations that have given rise to modern Indian identity makes a significant contribution to the discourse of contemporary multiculturalism and ethnic studies.

The Northwest Passage was repeatedly sought for over four centuries. From the first attempt in the late 15th century to Roald Amundsen's famous voyage of 1903-1906 where the feat was first accomplished to expeditions in the late 1940s by the Mounties to discover an even more northern route, author Alan Day covers all aspects of the ongoing quest that excited the imagination of the world. This compendium of explorers, navigators, and expeditions tackles this broad topic with a convenient, but extensive cross-referenced dictionary. A chronology traces the long succession of treks to find the passage, the introduction helps explain what motivated them, and the bibliography provides a means for those wishing to discover more information on this exciting subject.

Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present has become a beloved reflection of Seattle’s history and its possible futures as imagined in 1976, when the book was first published. Drawing on demographic analysis, residential surveys, portraiture, and personal observation and reflection, Sale provides his take on what was most important in each of Seattle’s main periods, from the city’s founding, when settlers built a city great enough that the railroads eventually had to come; down to the post-Boeing Seattle of the 1970s, when the city was coming to terms with itself based on lessons from its past. Along the way, Sale touches on the economic diversity of late nineteenth-century Seattle that allowed it to grow; describes the major achievements of the first boom years in parks, boulevards, and neighborhoods of quiet elegance; and draws portraits of people like Vernon Parrington, Nellie Cornish, and Mark Tobey, who came to Seattle and flourished. The result is a powerful assessment of Seattle’s vitality, the result of old-timers and newcomers mixing both in harmony and in antagonism. With a new introduction by Seattle journalist Knute Berger, this edition invites today's readers to revisit Sale’s time capsule of Seattle—and perhaps learn something unexpected about this ever-changing city.

Frontier Boosters is a compelling social history of urbanization and economic development in the nineteenth-century American West. Focusing on Port Townsend, Washington and the surrounding Puget Sound region, Elaine Naylor examines economic development, "boosterism," and the dynamics of class and race in frontier settlement. In the late-nineteenth century, Seattle had not yet fully emerged as the premier city of the Pacific Northwest, and the residents of Port Townsend had every reason to imagine their town - located at the entrance to Puget Sound, the waterway for the timber resources that drove Washington's frontier economy - as the region's burgeoning metropolis. Naylor argues that the promotion of local economic development, defined as boosterism and commonly linked with land speculators, investors, and businessmen, was in fact embraced by ordinary frontier citizens. As such a "booster" mentality became integrated into Port Townsend's social dynamics, shaping the town's class and race relations, specifically between its Euro-American, Native American, and Chinese communities. Frontier Boosters illuminates the importance of economic development to ordinary settlers and highlights the complex interrelationship between the social dynamics of class and race within the context of the American frontier.

Between 1920 and 1933 the issue of prohibition proved to be the greatest challenge to Canada-U.S. relations. When the United States adopted national prohibition in 1920—ironically, just as Canada was abandoning its own national and provincial experiments with prohibition—U.S. tourists and dollars promptly headed north and Canadian liquor went south. Despite repeated efforts, Americans were unable to secure Canadian assistance in enforcing American prohibition laws until 1930. Bootleggers and Borders explores the important but surprisingly overlooked Canada-U.S. relationship in the Pacific Northwest during Prohibition. Stephen T. Moore maintains that the reason Prohibition created such an intractable problem lies not with the relationship between Ottawa and Washington DC but with everyday operations experienced at the border level, where foreign relations are conducted according to different methods and rules and are informed by different assumptions, identities, and cultural values. Through an exploration of border relations in the Pacific Northwest, Bootleggers and Borders offers insight into not only the Canada-U.S. relationship but also the subtle but important differences in the tactics Canadians and Americans employed when confronted with similar problems. Ultimately, British Columbia’s method of addressing temperance provided the United States with a model that would become central to its abandonment and replacement of Prohibition.