Seattle at 150: Stories of the City Through 150 Objects from the Seattle Municipal Archives

When your city is changing every time you turn around, history can be something you want to hold onto, and the indefatigable local historians at HistoryLink know that is often best done deep in the archives. In this approachable coffee-table keepsake, they've unearthed an object for each of our city's 150 years, and their choices balance between boosterish nostalgia (oh, that Ivar!) and critical documentation (the waves of bureaucratic exclusion of Chinese and Japanese residents). The best documentation comes from actual documents—handwritten, hand-typed, hand-annotated—that evoke the haunting presence of individual humanity in the tides of the past.