Community Videos

University of Washington Professor Emeritus John Findlay focuses on the changing populations of Seattle and how they were shaped by the nation’s evolving concepts of citizenship. He examines the historical demographics of the city and look at what groups of people came to and settled in Seattle over the decades. He also explores how laws and policies regarding citizenship influenced who came and stayed and who was and was not welcome in the city. Largely national in scope, those laws and policies governed immigration and naturalization, voting rights and civil rights, and the status of Native peoples, among other things. Seattleites did not merely accept, apply, and endure federal laws and policies, however. At times they defied national guidelines by trying to substitute their own or by campaigning to redefine who could or could not possess the rights of citizenship.