Annual Meeting 2020

Given the developing situation with the COVID-19 disease, and based on recommendations from King County Public Health and the University of Washington, the PNW Historians Guild has decided to POSTPONE our Annual Meeting on March 6. We deeply regret having to do this and apologize for any inconvenience that it causes.

We do hope to reschedule it in the near future and will be in touch with scheduling updates.

The 2020 Annual Meeting of the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild will be Friday, March 6, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the University of Washington, Special Collections, Allen South Library. The Guild’s lifetime achievement award will be presented to Dr. Karen J. Blair.

The Guild’s annual award is given to an individual who has made significant contributions to the writing, preserving, and promotion of Pacific Northwest history. For more than 40 years, Dr. Blair has nurtured the field of women’s history in the Pacific Northwest and been a career-long mainstay and inspiration for other scholars.

Karen Blair taught at the University of Washington from 1979 to 1987, then joined the faculty of Central Washington University and retired from that position in 2014, after decades of research, writing, and teaching. She also served on countless committees for the promotion of regional history, including being one of the founders of the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild and a longtime board member of the Kittitas County Historical Museum. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from SUNY/Buffalo.

Blair is best known for her work on women’s clubs and their impact on the communities where they engaged in both cultural and civic activities. She has published six books, including The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined 1868-1914, a book that challenges the now-popular slogan that “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History”; The Torchbearers: Women and their Amateur Arts Organizations; and Women in Pacific Northwest History, a collection of essays for which she was organizer and editor. She was twice honored by the American Library Association for the Best Bibliography in History for Northwest Women in 1998 and for Women’s Voluntary Associations in 1990.

In addition to her scholarly work, Karen Blair is known for her guidance and influence on other scholars. According to Dr. Lorraine McConaghy, retired public historian at MOHAI, Dr. Blair “showed me – and gently taught me – how to see things differently, how to see ordinary things with new eyes. Many years ago, she read and studied the meeting minutes of a number of women’s clubs, which other scholars had ignored as dull, self-congratulatory, and elitist, and drew from her research a vivid set of understandings about women’s worlds in the Pacific Northwest. Those understandings had been hidden from view; Karen brought them front and center, exploring politics, education, culture, social activism, and women’s shaping of their own experience.”

It is particularly appropriate to honor her in this centennial of ratification of the nineteenth amendment for women’s suffrage. Blair served on the statewide Women’s History Consortium that planned the 2010 Washington Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commemoration.