Events and Public Outreach

This year, our department moved our conversations about the histories that shape us and historical processes out of the classroom into the broader WSU, Pullman, and Eastern Washington communities.

RCI Event Series

Confronting today’s most pressing issues with clarity and purpose requires historical understanding. The RCI Event Series invites students, faculty, and staff across our campuses—as well as our communities—to engage in thoughtful conversation about how the past informs our present as local, national, and global citizens.

During the 2023–2024 academic year, the event series addressed questions about selective history and its impacts: What is remembered and how? What do we lose in the silencing and erasing of key historical evidence and understanding?

  • In April, Professor Megan Asaka, associate professor of history, University of California, Riverside and author of Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure and the Making of a Pacific Coast City presented her research, “The Dividing Line: Race and Segregation in Early Seattle,” which examined the creation of a geographical line in the city, dividing north and south, and white and non-white.
  • In February, the series hosted the Richland movie screening. The film opened at the Tribeca film festival in 2023 and explores the environmental and human cost of the eastern Washington company town’s involvement with the Manhattan Project at Hanford during World War II. Filmmaker Irene Lusztig is intrigued by Richland’s present and past as “a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story” and the “habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past.”
  • In November, “Shifting Narratives: The Steptoe Battlefield and Popular Memory” by the history department’s Professor Ryan Booth, examined a local history largely forgotten—the Battle of Pine Creek (Steptoe Battlefield) as an important site for more than the day of fighting. It is the site of a convergence of Pacific Northwest history where sacred land, broken treaty promises, Jesuits, and an inept army commander collided on May 17, 1858. Critically, this speaking event was held at Neill Public Library and sought to engage the greater Palouse community in the presentation, which had a standing-room-only crowd.
  • The discussion panel “History in the Future” coincided with the national Banned Books Week in October. It brought together experts from the Pullman school system, WSU libraries, and WSU faculty in an interactive panel that explored the risks associated with decreased access to—and understanding of—critical historical information. The panel asked the question: what does this mean for future students, educators, and the citizenry as a whole?
The Sherman and Mabel Smith Pettyjohn Memorial Lecture in History

The Pettyjohn Endow lecture series aims to advance research and public engagement with the history of the Pacific Northwest and to amplify scholarship about the communities WSU serves in its land-grant mission.

The 2024 Sherman & Mabel Smith Pettyjohn lecture on Indigenous history invited Professor Patrick Lozar (Salish and Kootenai) of the University of Montana to present his work, “‘What is the Meaning of this Boundary Line?’: Indigenous Nationhood and Colonial Borders,” on March 29. Professor Lozar’s presentation examined the ways that invisible boundaries like the U.S.-Canadian border can divide Indigenous families and lands and the ways that Indigenous communities respond to those divisions.

Sponsored Events

WSU Department of History co-sponsored Berehyni: Keepers of the Flame: Ukrainian Women’s Stories of Resilience through Film, Art and Culture. The event was a cultural exhibit and pysanky (Ukrainian Easter egg) demonstration that accompanied a screening of five short documentaries, Berehyni: Keepers of the Flame, which Ukrainian women from the Pullman community introduced. The films told the stories of five Ukrainian women who used their individual talents and strengths in defense of Ukraine.

The department also co-sponsored a screening of the documentary series by Ukrainian filmmaker Volodymyr Sydko, Women Guardians at War, at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center in Moscow. Admission was free and open to the public. The films showcase five women and their stories of perseverance since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Finally, WSU’s history department in Pullman hosted Trevor Getz, professor at San Francisco State University, president of the World History Association, and author of thirteen books on African and World History, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men. His talk, “The Entanglement of Slavery & Marriage in Early Colonial Gold Coast,” was held Tuesday, March 26.