The Seattle Public Library is pleased to present its new Alaska-Yukon-Pacific-Exposition Digital Collection. 

On Monday, October 28, 2008, the Nordic Spirit was released from the shed at the Nordic Heritage Museum where she has been housed for the past 28 years.

A late 18th- or early 19th-century fishing boat from the northern fjords of Norway, the Nordic Spirit was given to Seattle’s Nordic Heritage Museum by Volvo-Penta of America in 1980, after serving as an outreach tool for the Swedish company. In the early 1960’s Volvo re-imagined and outfitted the vessel with Viking-style embellishments.

A century ago, the young University of Washington was growing and reaching out to the world, not only with the A-Y-P Exposition -- held on campus in 1909 -- but also with two new academic departments: Scandiavian Languages and the Department of Oriental History, Literature and Institutions. Those departments have since transformed to become four College and Arts and Sciences departments: Scandinavian Studies, Asian Languages and Literature, Near Eastern Languagesn and Civilization, and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. The lecture series starts the four department's 2009 centennial anniverary celebrations.