Nadine Jelsing

Who was the badass woman who became the namesake for Portland’s only lesbian bar? Dr. Marie Equi was born in 1872 and came to Oregon at the age of 20. She became known as a radical and lived an extraordinary life.

The world’s first successful heart valve replacement surgery was performed in 1960 at what’s now Oregon Health & Science University. Behind this life-saving innovation was an unlikely partnership between a young surgeon and retired engineer.

Born in 1872 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Marie Equi grew up in a working-class immigrant family and labored in the town’s textile mills to help support the family. As a young woman, she self-studied her way into medical school and received her degree in 1903. But her life took a hard left into radical politics after she made her way to Oregon.

In 1934, West Coast longshoremen fought, fell and ultimately triumphed together despite the odds. It was called the “The Big Strike.”

The year was 1913. In Eastern Oregon, the town of Copperfield was known for heavy drinking, corrupt local politics, daytime brawls and nighttime brothels. To the west of the Cascades, Fern Hobbs was developing her own reputation, as the first Oregon woman to receive an important political appointment after the state granted women the right to vote.

By the 1920s Oregon had well-established Japanese American communities in Portland and Hood River. Immigrant pioneers managed businesses, thriving farms and orchards with their American-born children. Pearl Harbor changed everything. 

A new OPB documentary explores how the Vietnam War still deeply affects Oregonians, even nearly 50 years after the end of combat operations in Vietnam.

"The Vietnam War Oregon Remembers" illuminates widely divergent viewpoints of a volatile time in American and Oregon history. 

During the early 1940s, Vanport, Oregon, was the second largest city in the state. But on a Sunday afternoon in May 1948, it disappeared completely — destroyed by a catastrophic flood. 

Irish immigrant Thomas Condon was a Congregational minister and Oregon's first state geologist.