Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851-2001

This is the definitive book on Portland's political history, beginning in 1845 when a 16-lot townsite was laid out on the bank of the Willamette River and continuing through the sesquicentennial of Portland city government. Lansing shows that Portland's path to its present place as the twenty-eighth largest city in the United States, with a deserved reputation as one of the nation's most livable cities, has not always been smooth. Corruption, profiteering, and wide-open vice characterized the City of Roses at the turn of the twentieth century, and every era has had its own controversies and disputes over railroad franchises and rights-of-way, women's suffrage, public versus private power, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Prohibition, and the siting of freeways, to name just a few.