Completing the Union

Completing the Union
Author: John S. Whitehead
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826336378

The story of the thirteen-year effort to add the 49th and 50th states to the Union.

Battleground Alaska

Battleground Alaska
Author: Stephen Haycox
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700622152

No American state is more antistatist than Alaska. And no state takes in more federal money per capita, which accounts for a full third of Alaska's economy. This seeming paradox underlies the story Stephen Haycox tells in Battleground Alaska, a history of the fraught dynamic between development and environmental regulation in a state aptly dubbed "The Last Frontier." Examining inconvenient truths, the book investigates the genesis and persistence of the oft-heard claim that Congress has trampled Alaska's sovereignty with its management of the state's pristine wilderness. At the same time it debunks the myth of an inviolable Alaska statehood compact at the center of this claim. Unique, isolated, and remote, Alaska's economy depends as much on absentee corporate exploitation of its natural resources, particularly oil, as it does on federal spending. This dependency forces Alaskans to endorse any economic development in the state, putting them in conflict with restrictive environmental constraint. Battleground Alaska reveals how Alaskans' abiding resentment of federal regulation and control has exacerbated the tensions and political sparring between these camps—and how Alaska's leaders have exploited this antistatist sentiment to promote their own agendas, specifically the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Haycox builds his history and critique around four now classic environmental battles in modern Alaska: the establishment of the ANWR is the 1950s; the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s; the passage of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act in 1980; and the struggle that culminated in the Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990. What emerges is a complex tale, with no clear-cut villains and heroes, that explains why Alaskans as a collective almost always opt for development, even as they profess their genuine love for the beauty and bounty of their state's environment. Yet even as it exposes the potential folly of this practice, Haycox's work reminds environmentalists that all wilderness is inhabited, and that human life depends—as it always has—on the exploitation of the earth's resources.

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
Author: Bathsheba Demuth
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393635171

Winner of the 2021 AHA John H. Dunning Prize Longlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Nature, NPR, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews "A monument to a people and their land… an allegory of the world we have created." —Sven Beckert, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of Cotton: A Global History Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.

Ice Palace

Ice Palace
Author: Edna Ferber
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2014-03-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 034580614X

Originally published in 1958, Ice Palace is Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber's classic and mighty novel about the taming of a great northern wilderness—Alaska. Czar Kennedy came to Alaska for money and power, Thor Storm for a dream. This is the story of their struggle, over a long half-century, for the future of Alaska and the destiny of their beautiful, rebellious granddaughter, Christine, a courageous woman who must make a choice that will shape the destiny of a new generation. Above all, it is the glowing and eloquent tale of Alaska itself—the last, great American frontier.

Alaska Politics & Government

Alaska Politics & Government
Author: Gerald A. McBeath
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780803231207

This book examines Alaska's character and the forces shaping it. Underlying their descriptions are the themes of independence, dependence, and the search for sustainable economic development.

An Alaska Anthology

An Alaska Anthology
Author: Stephen W Haycox
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780295974958

Twenty-five contemporary scholars explore Alaska's pivotal events, significant themes, and major players, Native, Russian, Canadian, and American. The essays give depth to our understanding and appreciation of Alaskan history from the days of Russian-American Company domination to the threat of nuclear testing by the Atomic Energy Commission.

State Out of the Union

State Out of the Union
Author: Jeff Biggers
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2012-09-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1568587023

Discusses the biggest issues facing Arizona--including immigration, guns, health care, the Tea Party and vigilantism--and how a radicalized Arizona has become a national bellwether.

Fifty Miles from Tomorrow

Fifty Miles from Tomorrow
Author: William L. Iggiagruk Hensley
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780374154844

Documents the author's traditional childhood north of the Arctic Circle, his education in the continental U.S., and his lobbying efforts that convinced the government to allocate resources to Alaska's natives in compensation for incursions on their way of life.