Oregon Detour

First published in 1930, this is the first novel of a Northwest journalist who became one of the region's best-known writers. Its New Realist depiction of Weston, Oregon--thinly disguised as "Creston"--shocked some Weston residents and created a lingering controversy. George Venn's introduction tells how the people of Weston reacted to Oregon detour, and sets the book in its regional and literary context for modern readers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This synthesis report will be of interest to officials of municipal, regional, and statewide transportation and law enforcement agencies who are responsible for roadway incident diversion practices. It will also be of interest to others who interact with these agencies to achieve a better understanding of the processes, barriers, and technologies associated with alternate route plan development and deployment. This report presents state-of-the-practice information about the development and implementation of roadway incident diversion practices. It documents specific trends in the practice, and in examining individual practices, identifies unique plans, processes, and technologies from which other agencies may find useful applications. This TRB report addresses a broad list of topics associated with roadway incident diversion and profiles successful incident diversion practices, as reported by surveyed agencies. In particular, it focuses concern on alternate route plans for random incidents, those resulting in nonrecurring congestion.

It was 1869 and Sarah Moses, with "a very black eye," told her father: The world will never know what trouble I have seen. What she'd seen was violence at the hands of her husband. Does the world know any more of such things today than it did in Sarah's time? Sarah, it so happens, lived in Oregon, that Edenic state on the Pacific Coast, and it is here that David Peterson del Mar centers his history of violence against wives. What causes such violence? Has it changed over time? How does it relate to the state of society as a whole? And how have women tried to stop it, resist it, escape it? These are the questions Peterson del Mar pursues, and the answers he finds are as fascinating as they are disturbing. Thousands of thickly documented divorce cases from the Oregon circuit courts let us listen to voices who often go unheard. These are the people who didn't keep diaries or leave autobiographies, who sometimes could not write at all. Here they speak of a society that quietly condoned wife beating until the spread of an ethos of self-restraint in the late nineteenth century. And then, Peterson del Mar finds, the practice increased with a vengeance with the florescence of expressive individualism during the twentieth century. What Trouble I Have Seen also traces a dramatic shift in wives' response to their husbands' violence. Settler and Native American women commonly fought abusive mates. Most wives of the late nineteenth century acted more cautiously and relied on others for protection. But twentieth-century privatism, Peterson del Mar discovers, often isolated modern wives from family and neighbors, casting abused women on the mercy of the police, women's shelters, and, most important, their own resources. Thus a new emphasis on self-determination, even as it stimulated violence among men, enhanced the ability of women to resist and escape violent husbands. The first sustained history of violence toward wives, What Trouble I Have Seen offers remarkable testimony to the impact of social trends on the most private arrangements, and the resilience of women subject to a seemingly timeless crime.

Reading Portland is a literary exploration of the city's past and present. In over eighty selections, Portland is revealed through histories, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, novels, and news reports. This single volume gives voice to women and men; the colonizers and the colonized; white, Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Indian storytellers; and lower, middle, and upper classes. In his introduction, John Trombold considers the history of writing about a place that has nourished a provocative and errant literary tradition for over 150 years. In the preface, Peter Donahue considers the influence of region--particularly Portland's urbanity and its hybrid population--on literature. Included here are the voices of Carl Abbott, Kathryn Hall Bogle, Beverly Cleary, Robin Cody, Lawson Fusao Inada, Rudyard Kipling, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joaquin Miller, Sandy Polishuk, Gary Snyder, Kim Stafford, Elizabeth Woody, and many more.

An important contribution to the growing body of literature of place and to the increasingly notable literature of the Pacific Northwest.