You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The largest by far of the fifty states, Alaska is also the state of greatest mystery and diversity. And, as Claus-M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick show in this comprehensive survey, the history of Alaska’s peoples and the development of its economy have matched the diversity of its land- and seascapes. Alaska: A History begins by examining the region’s geography and the Native peoples who inhabited it for thousands of years before the first Europeans arrived. The Russians claimed northern North America by right of discovery in 1741. During their occupation of “Russian America” the region was little more than an outpost for fur hunters and traders. When the czar sold the territory to t...
Alaska, with its Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut heritage, its century of Russian colonization, its peoples’ formidable struggles to wrest a living (or a fortune) from the North’s isolated and harsh environment, and its relatively recent achievement of statehood, has long captured the popular imagination. In An Alaska Anthology, twenty-five contemporary scholars explore the region’s pivotal events, significant themes, and major players, Native, Russian, Canadian, and American. The essays chosen for this anthology represent the very best writing on Alaska, giving great depth to our understanding and appreciation of its history from the days of Russian-American Company domination to the more r...
In 1969, an icebreaking tanker, the SS Manhattan, was commissioned by Humble Oil to transit the Northwest Passage in order to test the logistical and economic feasibility of an all-marine transportation system for Alaska North Slope crude oil. Proposed as an alternative to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the Manhattan made two voyages to the North American Arctic and collected volumes of scientific data on ice conditions and the behavior of ships in ice. Although the Manhattan successfully navigated the Northwest Passage—closing a five-hundred-year chapter of Arctic exploration by becoming the first commercial vessel to do so—the expedition ultimately demonstrated the impracticality of moving crude oil using icebreaking ships. Breaking Ice for Arctic Oil details this historic voyage, establishing its significant impact on the future of marine traffic and resource development in the Arctic and setting the stage for the current oil crisis.
The Arctic has, for some forty years, been among the most innovative policy environments in the world. The region has developed impressive systems for intra-regional cooperation, responded to the challenges of the rapid environmental change, empowered and engaged with Indigenous peoples, and dealt with the multiple challenges of natural resource development. The Palgrave Handbook on Arctic Policy and Politics has drawn on scholars from many countries and academic disciplines to focus on the central theme of Arctic policy innovation. The portrait that emerges from these chapters is of a complex, fluid policy environment, shaped by internal, national and global dynamics and by a wide range of political, legal, economic, and social transitions. The Arctic is a complex place from a political perspective and is on the verge of becoming even more so. Effective, proactive and forward-looking policy innovation will be required if the Far North is to be able to address its challenges and capitalize on its opportunities.
Johnny’s Girl the nationally acclaimed memoir of growing up in Alaska’s underworld as the only child of gambler John F. “Johnny” Rich and exotic dancer, Frances “Ginger” Rich. It chronicles Alaska’s mean streets and her parent’s tragic lives that were cut short. Kim Rich was an ordinary girl trapped in an extraordinary childhood, someone who dreamed of going to parties and getting good grades while living in an after-hours hell of gamblers, pimps, and con men. She longed for normalcy, yet she was inescapably her father's child, and she had no choice but to grow up fast. Her mother, who suffered from mental illness, was a stripper and B-girl: her father was a major player in the underworld of Anchorage, Alaska in the sixties, a city flush with newfound oil money. Only after her father was gruesomely murdered when she was 15, and Kim became a journalist, was she able to fill in the missing pieces of one American dream gone horribly wrong. Kim's true story is a tale of a woman's search for her parent's secrets. What she finds is both shocking and tragic, but in the end she's able to discover her true self amid the remnants of her parents' lost lives.
Situated between Europe and Asia, Russia has systematically challenged the European theories attached to nationhood due to its geopolitical and cultural peculiarities. After the rise of European nationalist movements, imperial Russia posed a threat to the very existence of the Germanic empires of Britain, Germany and Austria, and was frequently evoked to epitomise European barbarism, paganism, despotism and the Orient. In its struggle to acquire a new identity, which would bridge the gap with Western empires, Russia could not conform to the rising Anglo-Saxon movements that sought to glorify Nordic supremacy at the expense of the Oriental Other. Drawing upon this binary opposition between th...
From a fire policy of prevention at all costs to today's restored burning, Between Two Fires is America's history channeled through the story of wildland fire management. Stephen J. Pyne tells of a fire revolution that began in the 1960s as a reaction to simple suppression and single-agency hegemony, and then matured into more enlightened programs of fire management. It describes the counterrevolution of the 1980s that stalled the movement, the revival of reform after 1994, and the fire scene that has evolved since then. Pyne is uniquely qualified to tell America’s fire story. The author of more than a score of books, he has told fire’s history in the United States, Australia, Canada, Eu...
Describes the culture, religion, and daily life of the Eskimos, explains their family and community relationships, and looks at tools, masks, clothings, and carvings
The experiences of a young woman who was the first band instructor in a remote fishing village in 1950s Alaska.
The history of the Arctic is rich, filled with fascinating and heroic stories of exploration, multicultural interactions, and humans facing nature at its most extreme. In Finding the Arctic, the accomplished arctic researcher Matthew Sturm collects some of the most memorable and moving of these stories and weaves them around his own story of a 2,500-mile snowmobile expedition across arctic Alaska and Canada. During that trip, Sturm and six companions followed a circuitous route that brought them to many of the most historic spots in the North. They stood in the footsteps of their predecessors, experienced the landscape and the weather, and gained an intimate perspective on notable historical events, all chronicled here by Sturm. Written with humor and pathos, Finding the Arctic is a classic tale of adventure travel. And throughout the book,Sturm, with his thirty-eight years of experience in the North, emerges as an excellent guide for any who wish to understand the Arctic of today and yesterday.