Promotional Information

The creation of Seattle and the displacement of those who built it

About the Author

Megan Asaka is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews

"One of the strengths of Asaka's book is the way it writes "history from below," digging up information about ordinary, struggling, marginalized people who don't leave records or interest standard historians. The result is a book that is full of insights, characters, and new story lines...This brave book is well-written and bracing." (Post Alley) "Asaka deftly foregrounds the experiences of transient and surveilled workers to tell the story of Seattle's intercultural commerce and communities. [Her] tour de force offers lessons and strategies for local mobilization today." (The Stranger) "Asaka's book provides a model for how to examine other cities in our collective work to address structural racism in the U.S." (Pacific Northwest Quarterly (PNQ)) "[An] instant classic. . . . Stunningly original in the way she mines elusive sources, Asaka's exhaustive research demonstrates the persistent thorniness of telling "histories from below" due to archival preferences for elite and middle-class stories." (Western Historical Quarterly) "[W]ell-researched, compelling, and much-needed . . . In this thought-provoking study, Asaka weaves together urban and rural sites as well as numerous minoritized communities to outline both Seattle's uniqueness and its important place in the larger history of urban development in the United States. In doing so, Asaka successfully pushes against dominant narratives of U.S. urban history that obscure the relevance of Seattle and of the Pacific Northwest more broadly. Seattle from the Margins is an invaluable addition to Pacific Northwest history, immigration history, and the history of urban development in the United States." (Pacific Historical Review)