Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People

Author's Note

7 Author’s Note In 1985, I authored Portland: Gateway to the Northwest, a brief history of the city with historical photographs and images assembled by Ted Van Arsdol. That book has long been out of print. In the meanwhile, a quarter century of research and writing has greatly expanded and enriched our knowledge of Portland and Portlanders. The present book builds on my earlier work while incorporating the new generation of scholarship. By rough estimate, the bibliography at the end has doubled in length—even without listing every relevant M.A. thesis by Portland State University history students. The sequence of chapters remains the same, but the text has grown by more than a third and the narrative now carries into the twenty-first century. I want to thank Tanya March for her indefatigable enthusiasm in helping to identify new images to supplement the text. Thanks as well to Norman Gholston and Thomas Robinson for making many of the images available for my use; to Brian Johnson, Mary Hansen, and the staff of the Portland Archives and Records Center for their great help; to Meg Merrick of the Institute for Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University for help with several maps; to the Oregon Historical Society; and to Robert Johnston and Murase Associates for permission to use individual images. Readers will also find more and different sorts of people in the story. There are still plenty of politicians and business leaders, for we can’t tell the story of Portland without William Ladd and Edgar Kaiser, George Baker and Vera Katz. But there are also more workers and immigrants, more union members and dissenters, more women at work and women in the public realm, more artists and more activists. Millions of individuals have made the city of Portland and the surrounding region their home for a few years or for decades. By a quick backof -the-envelope calculation, Portlanders have lived something like 12 billion 8 portland in three centuries person-days in the 165 years since the founding of their European American city. When one recalls that it took James Joyce hundreds of pages to cover a single day’s worth of Leopold Bloom’s activities and thoughts, it is clear that no single book can do justice to such a rich mosaic of experience. I hope, nevertheless, that Portland in Three Centuries can help us understand the web of opportunities and problems that have helped to shape those intertwining lives. ...