Short answers, pulled from the story.
Alaska holds both distinctions because the Aleutian Islands extend so far west that some of them cross into the Eastern Hemisphere. The International Date Line was drawn west of 180 degrees specifically to keep all of Alaska within the same legal day, while still placing it in the Eastern Hemisphere by longitude.
The United States purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. The purchase was made on the 30th of March 1867, negotiated by Secretary of State William H. Seward under President Andrew Johnson. Critics immediately called it Seward's Folly.
Alaska was officially proclaimed the 49th state of the United States on the 3rd of January 1959. Statehood was approved by the U.S. Congress on the 7th of July 1958, following a territorial referendum in 1946 that gave the statehood movement its first real momentum.
The Good Friday earthquake struck on the 27th of March 1964 at 5:36 in the evening and measured a moment magnitude of 9.2, making it the fourth-most-powerful earthquake in recorded history. It lasted 4 minutes and 38 seconds, ruptured 600 miles of fault at once, and killed 133 people, mostly from the resulting tsunamis and landslides.
The Alaska Permanent Fund is a constitutionally authorized appropriation of oil revenues, established by voters in 1976. Starting in 1982, dividends from the fund's annual growth have been paid to eligible Alaskans who have lived in the state for a minimum of 12 months. The dividend ranged from an initial $1,000 in 1982 to $3,269 in 2008.
More than half of Alaska's land is owned by the Federal Government. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 added tens of millions of acres to national wildlife refuges, national forests, and national parks, and Alaska now contains two-thirds of all American national parklands.
The Ancient Beringians were a genetically distinct population identified through the DNA of a six-week-old infant unearthed in 2013 at the Upward Sun River site in the Tanana Valley by archaeologist Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The infant's DNA showed she belonged to a group genetically separate from other Native peoples present elsewhere in the New World at the end of the Pleistocene.