In the postseasons of 2005, 2006 and 2007, the Oregon State Beavers baseball team achieved a seemingly impossible dream and forever changed the culture of Northwest sports. After nearly a century of dismissal as a wet-weather team, unable to compete with the southern baseball belt on the national stage, a run of three College World Series appearances and back-to-back titles earned the Beavers national respect. Inspired by his own coverage of the dramatic seasons, "Corvallis Gazette-Times" sportswriter Cliff Kirkpatrick recounts the program's rise to prominence and lasting legacy. Filled with firsthand insights from players and coaches and photos of pivotal moments and stands filled with orange and black, this retrospective captures the magic of Oregon State's three-season run.

The People's School is a comprehensive history of Oregon State University, placing the institution's story in the context of state, regional, national, and international history. Rather than organizing the narrative around presidencies, historian William Robbins examines the broader context of events, such as wars and economic depressions, that affected life on the Corvallis campus. Agrarian revolts in the last quarter of the nineteenth century affected every Western state, including Oregon. The Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Second World War disrupted institutional life, influencing enrollment, curricular strategies, and the number of faculty and staff. Peacetime events, such as Oregon's tax policies, also circumscribed course offerings, hiring and firing, and the allocation of funds to departments, schools, and colleges. This contextual approach is not to suggest that university presidents are unimportant. Benjamin Arnold (1872-1892), appointed president of Corvallis College by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, served well beyond the date (1885) when the State of Oregon assumed control of the agricultural college. Robbins uses central administration records and grassroots sources--local and state newspapers, student publications (The Barometer, The Beaver), and multiple and wide-ranging materials published in the university's digitized ScholarsArchive@OSU, a source for the scholarly work of faculty, students, and materials related to the institution's mission and research activities. Other voices--extracurricular developments, local and state politics, campus reactions to national crises--provide intriguing and striking addendums to the university's rich history.

Since 1894, the Ducks and the Beavers have squared off on the gridiron to do battle for football bragging rights in Oregon. It's a rivalry that pits family members against one another, splitting the allegiance of an entire state. Award-winning sports journalist Kerry Eggers tells the complete story of one of the most historic rivalries in college football. Through firsthand interviews with the key performers in the rivalry and extensive research in both schools' archives, Eggers offers a comprehensive account of the players, coaches and fans who have made the Civil War the state's most anticipated football game. Whether a Beaver or a Duck, this is a book no fan can do without.

A School for the People tells the story of OSU's nearly 150 years as a land grant institution through more than 500 photographs, maps, documents, and extensive captions. A capsule history includes many of the iconic photographs associated with the university. Other chapters focus on themes such as campus development, the growth of academics, the evolution of research as a major focus of the university, campus life and organizations, and, of course, athletics. As one of the first colleges and universities to offer photography as part of its curriculum in the early 1890s, OSU is well documented visually. Most of those photographic treasures have made their way into the holdings of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center at OSU's Valley Library. Gleaned from hundreds of thousands of images at the Center, many of the photos included here have never before been seen by the general public. Several were scanned from the original glass and film negatives and color transparencies to ensure the highest-quality reproductions. Written by a longtime archivist at OSU's Special Collections & Archives Research Center, A School for the People does not obscure the inevitable ups and downs of the institution with the manicured gloss of recruitment brochures, but aims to tell the full, dynamic story of this multi-faceted and living university. Overflowing with visual riches, it will appeal to OSU alumni, faculty and staff, and anyone with an interest in the history of higher education in Oregon or land grant institutions generally.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act, setting into motion one of the great land-use experiments of modern times. The act struck a compromise between protection for one of the West's most stunning landscapes--the majestic Gorge carved by Ice Age floods, which today divides Washington and Oregon--and encouragement of compatible economic development in communities on both sides of the river. In Bridging a Great Divide, award-winning environmental journalist Kathie Durbin draws on interviews, correspondence, and extensive research to tell the story of the major shifts in the Gorge since the Act's passage. Sweeping change has altered the Gorge's landscape: upscale tourism and outdoor recreation, gentrification, the end of logging in national forests, the closing of aluminum plants, wind farms, and a population explosion in the metropolitan area to its west. Yet, to the casual observer, the Gorge looks much the same as it did twenty-five years ago. How can we measure the success of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act? In this insightful and revealing history, Durbin suggests that the answer depends on who you are: a small business owner, an environmental watchdog group, a chamber of commerce. The story of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area is the story of the Pacific Northwest in microcosm, as the region shifts from a natural-resource-based economy to one based on recreation, technology, and quality of life.

"This volume, which contains essays by both historians and legal scholars, examines various aspects of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal civil rights statute in American history"--