A journalist, historian and author, Tate was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, grew up in Seattle, and attended the University of Washington for a year before beginning her journalism career. She worked as a reporter at the Twin Falls Times-News in Idaho and for the Elko (Nevada) News. From there she moved to the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune where she met her husband, Glenn Drosendahl, and won a yearlong Nieman Fellowship at Harvard for her environmental reporting. She was the first Idaho journalist awarded that honour. After spending the 1976-77 academic year in Massachusetts, she and her family returned to Lewiston before moving to Seattle in 1979. Tate reviewed restaurants for the Puget Sound Business Journal, wrote for The Weekly, served as managing editor of Seattle Voice magazine and, while working as a science/medical reporter for the local Journal-American, wrote about the revival of nature at Mount St. Helens five years after the volcano erupted. After writing op-ed pieces for The Seattle Times and magazines such as Smithsonian, she earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Washington and stayed on to get her PhD in American history. Tate turned her doctoral dissertation into a book: “Cigarette Wars: Triumph of the Little White Slaver,” published by Oxford University Press. She later became a major contributor to HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history. She wrote more than 200 essays for HistoryLink before turning her interest in missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman into the book “Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and its Shifting Legacy in the American West,” which was published in November 2020.