Portland, OR — Kick off the holiday season on Sunday, December 8 at Holiday Cheer: A Celebration of Oregon Authors. Visit with more than 60 local writers as you sip on hot cocoa, listen to carols, and get a jump on your holiday shopping!  

For 55 years, OHS has celebrated the state’s rich literary talents at this annual book signing event. This year, some of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent authors will be at OHS selling everything from children’s books to guidebooks to mysteries to histories! View a full list of participating authors at ohs.org/holidaycheer.

To add to the holiday cheer, The Dickens Carolers will be strolling through the museum performing lively holiday songs from 1:30pm–2:30pm, and Santaland is back on view!  Visit this nostalgic vignette, which features items from the original Meier & Frank Santaland including Rudolph, animatronic elves, holiday decor, a model of the famous monorail, and even the famous Cinnamon Bear costume! Each year, our museum team adds a new “Easter egg” to the display; can you spot the difference this year?

Book sales at Holiday Cheer support the Oregon Historical Society’s mission to preserve our state’s history and make it accessible to everyone in ways that advance knowledge and inspire curiosity about all the people, places, and events that have shaped Oregon.

Holiday Cheer begins at noon and authors will be signing until 4pm. Admission is free to both the book sale and to visit museum exhibitions, with OHS’s galleries open until 5pm. In addition to Santaland, current exhibitions include A Fountain of Creativity: Oregon’s 20th Century Artists and the Legacy of Arlene Schnitzer and Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West.

About the Oregon Historical Society

For nearly 125 years, the Oregon Historical Society has served as the state’s collective memory, preserving a vast collection of objects, photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, films, and oral histories. Our research library, museum, digital platforms, educational programming, and historical journal make Oregon’s history open and accessible to all. We exist because history is powerful, and because a history as deep and complex as Oregon’s cannot be contained within a single story or point of view. 

Masuo Yasui (far left) was a store merchant and landowner who was among the first-generation Japanese immigrants who formed a community in Hood River at the turn of the twentieth century. OHS Research Library, Yasui family papers, Coll. 949, box 38, folder 2.

Portland, OR — The Oregon Historical Society (OHS) and Densho are excited to announce a significant grant award from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for Citizen(s) Yasui: Illuminating the Japanese American Experience through the Yasui Family Collections. This two-year collaborative digitization project will create over 17,000 digital files from the Yasui family papers, Yasui Brothers business records, and Yabe family papers collections preserved in OHS’s research library. 

This grant award is part of CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices program, designed to support efforts to digitize materials that deepen public understanding of the histories of people of color and other communities and populations whose work, experiences, and perspectives have been insufficiently recognized or unattended. Citizen(s) Yasui is one of 18 funded projects that, through archival digitization efforts, ensures that new generations can engage with and learn from the stories, contributions, and cultural heritage of underrepresented groups.

“Public discourse requires an honest and rigorous understanding of our past; it is imperative that we expand access to these vital materials to foster scholarship and enrich our collective knowledge,” said CLIR president Charles Henry noted in a press release announcing the grant awardees. 

Building on the successes of recent projects highlighting and translating a selection of Japanese language materials, Citizen(s) Yasui will cover a much larger sample of these historically significant collection materials. Rare among archival collections in size and content, these three collections document early twentieth century immigration, business, farming, family, and community life in Oregon; Japanese American incarceration and separation during World War II; the work of later generations to rebuild in post-WWII America; and decades of activism to acknowledge incarceration and seek justice.

This project will enable free online access to these primary source materials documenting the Japanese American experience through OHS Digital Collections (digitalcollections.ohs.org), Densho Digital Repository (ddr.densho.org), and the Digital Public Library of America (dp.la). 

About the Oregon Historical Society

For more than 125 years, the Oregon Historical Society has served as the state’s collective memory, preserving a vast collection of photographs, books, maps, manuscript materials, films, oral histories, objects, and belongings. Our research library, museum, digital platforms, educational programming, and historical journal make Oregon’s history available to all. We preserve our state’s history and make it accessible to everyone in ways that advance knowledge and inspire curiosity about all the people, places, and events that have shaped Oregon. 

About Densho

Densho is a nonprofit organization started in 1996, with the initial goal of documenting oral histories from Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II. This evolved into a mission to educate, preserve, collaborate, and inspire action for equity. Densho uses digital technology to preserve and make accessible primary source materials on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans and presents these materials and related resources for their historic value and as a means of exploring issues of democracy, intolerance, wartime hysteria, civil rights and the responsibilities of citizenship in our increasingly global society. 

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Portland, OR — The Oregon Historical Society (OHS) will host a series of book talks this November with authors featuring local and national history. All events are free and open to the public and take place at the Oregon Historical Society (1200 SW Park Avenue, Portland).

On Thursday, November 7, at 6pm, OHS welcomes author Sidney Morrison for a talk on his historical novel Frederick Douglass that richly details the life of one of the most prominent Americans of the nineteenth century. Morrison’s portrayal of Douglass distinguishes him as one of the founders of American democracy, instrumental in ending the institution of slavery from which he escaped to become a fierce abolitionist, gifted orator, and newspaper publisher of The North Star. Sidney Morrison is a retired teacher and school principal and is now a part-time educational consultant and leadership coach for leaders in school districts in Southern California.

To celebrate Veterans Day weekend, OHS will host military historian and Desert Storm veteran Alisha Hamel on November 10 at 2pm as she reads from her new book, When Duty Called: An Oral History of Oregon’s World War II Veterans. This book features a series of engaging personal stories from Oregon World War II veterans who participated in some of the most well-known engagements of the war.

On November 14 at 6:30pm, Peter Boag, curator of OHS’s current exhibition Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West will share insights from the curatorial process as well as the research that went into writing his book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. Boag is Professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University and the author of four books.

This series of talks concludes on November 17 at 2pm when OHS hosts Ginette DePreist as she shares stories and reflections from her memoir Reach Up: My Beautiful Journey with James DePreist, which details her marriage to the late internationally acclaimed orchestra conductor, who led the Oregon Symphony from 1980 to 2003. Ginette DePreist, who was born in Quebec City, was married to James DePreist for more than 30 years and traveled with him throughout his career. 

About the Oregon Historical Society

For 125 years, the Oregon Historical Society has served as the state’s collective memory, preserving a vast collection of objects, photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, films, and oral histories. Our research library, museum, digital platforms, educational programming, and historical journal make Oregon’s history open and accessible to all.We exist because history is powerful, and because a history as deep and rich as Oregon’s cannot be contained within a single story or point of view.