Alaska

• 1. Introduction

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  Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area, yet it holds fewer residents than most mid-sized American cities. With a population of 740,133 in 2024, it ranks among the least populous states in the country. And yet it is simultaneously the most populous territory in North America located mostly north of the 60th parallel, home to more than quadruple the combined populations of Northern Canada and Greenland. How does a place that vast remain so empty? And how did a chunk of the North American continent end up being sold to the United States for $7.2 million in 1867 , a transaction its critics immediately dismissed as Seward's Folly? Alaska carries geographical paradoxes that take some untangling. It is the northernmost, westernmost, and simultaneously the easternmost state in the union. Its Aleutian Islands reach so far west that they cross into the Eastern Hemisphere, forcing the International Date Line to bend around them so Alaska stays within a single legal day. The state has a longer coastline than all other U.S. states combined, and its glacier ice alone covers an area close to the size of South Carolina. What follows is the story of a place that has been shaped by ancient crossings, colonial ambitions, catastrophic geology, black gold, and the sheer improbability of human settlement at the edge of the world.

• 2. The First Crossings

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  Indigenous peoples occupied Alaska for thousands of years before any European vessel arrived. The region is widely believed to have served as the entry point for the initial settlement of the Americas, a doorway opened by the Bering land bridge during an era when sea levels were low enough to connect Asia and North America. At the Upward Sun River site in the Tanana Valley, archaeologist Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks unearthed the remains of a six-week-old infant in 2013. Her DNA revealed she belonged to a population genetically distinct from other Native groups present elsewhere in the New World at the end of the Pleistocene. Potter named this group the Ancient Beringians, and their existence in Alaska represents some of the most direct evidence linking the continent's first inhabitants to a northeastern corridor.

  The peoples who followed and flourished across Alaska developed remarkably varied societies. The Tlingit, in what is now Southeast Alaska, built a society organized around a matrilineal kinship system that determined both property inheritance and descent. The Haida, also in the Southeast, became known across the region for a distinctive artistic tradition. The Tsimshian people came to Alaska from British Columbia in 1887, after President Grover Cleveland and the U.S. Congress granted them permission to settle on Annette Island, where they founded the town of Metlakatla. All three of these groups, along with other Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, suffered catastrophic smallpox outbreaks from the late 18th through the mid-19th century. The most devastating epidemics struck in the 1830s and 1860s, leaving high fatalities and deep social disruption across the region.

  The very name Alaska carries the memory of those who came first. During the Russian colonial period, the name referred to the Alaska Peninsula and was derived from an Aleut-language word, alaxsxaq, meaning "the mainland" or, more literally, "the object towards which the action of the sea is directed." The Aleutian language encoded a relationship with the ocean that the landscape itself makes plain: Alaska has nearly 34,000 miles of tidal shoreline.

• 3. Russian Ambitions

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  On the 21st of August 1732, the vessel St. Gabriel, under the authority of surveyor M. S. Gvozdev and assistant navigator I. Fyodorov, became the first European ship generally recognized to have reached Alaska. The arrival came during an expedition organized by Siberian Cossack A. F. Shestakov and Russian explorer Dmitry Pavlutsky. Nearly a decade later, in 1741, Vitus Bering led an expedition for the Russian Navy aboard the St. Peter. When his crew returned to Russia carrying sea otter pelts judged to be the finest fur in the world, a slow-moving rush began. Small associations of fur traders sailed east from Siberia toward the Aleutian Islands, marking the start of a sustained Russian presence.

  The first permanent European settlement was founded in 1784. The Russian-American Company later carried out an expanded colonization program in the early-to-mid-19th century, and Sitka on Baranof Island in the Alexander Archipelago became the capital of Russian America. The city was renamed New Archangel from 1804 to 1867. The Russians maintained a native Alaskan Creole population and left behind names and Orthodox churches that survive throughout southeastern Alaska to this day. Spain also staked a claim during this era. Between 1774 and 1800, Spanish expeditions reached Alaska to assert rights over the Pacific Northwest, which Spain considered part of New Spain, administered from Mexico City. In 1789, a Spanish settlement and fort were built in Nootka Sound, and those expeditions left their traces in place names such as Valdez, Bucareli Sound, and Cordova.

  For all the imperial energy invested in Alaska, the Russian colony was never very profitable. The expense and logistical difficulty of maintaining such a distant possession eventually became untenable. Russian Emperor Alexander II planned the sale, and in 1867 William H. Seward, the United States Secretary of State under President Andrew Johnson, negotiated the Alaska Purchase for $7.2 million. The purchase was made on the 30th of March 1867. Six months later, commissioners arrived in Sitka for the formal transfer. On the 18th of October 1867, 250 uniformed U.S. soldiers marched to the governor's house at "Castle Hill," where Russian troops lowered the Russian flag and the U.S. flag was raised. That date is now celebrated as Alaska Day, a legal holiday.

• 4. Territory to State

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  After the flag-raising at Fort Sitka, Alaska was governed loosely by the military and administered as a district starting in 1884, with a governor appointed by the U.S. president. For most of its first decade under the American flag, Sitka was the only community inhabited by American settlers, who organized what functioned as a provisional city government. Legislation allowing Alaskan communities to legally incorporate as cities did not arrive until 1900, and meaningful home rule was unavailable until statehood took effect in 1959.

  The territory's fortunes changed in the 1890s when gold rushes in Alaska and the nearby Yukon Territory brought thousands of miners and settlers north. From 1879 to 1920, Alaska produced a cumulative total of over $460 million in mineral production. In 1912, Alaska was formally incorporated as an organized territory, and the capital, which had been in Sitka until 1906, was moved north to Juneau. European immigrants from Norway and Sweden settled in the Southeast, entering the fishing and logging industries.

  During World War II, Alaska became a theater of war. Japanese forces occupied the islands of Attu, Agattu, and Kiska in the Aleutians during the Aleutian Islands Campaign. During the occupation, an American civilian and two U.S. Navy personnel were killed at Attu and Kiska, and nearly 50 Aleut civilians and eight sailors were interned in Japan. About half of the interned Aleuts died. The war also brought military infrastructure that would outlast the conflict, including the Alcan Highway, and the construction of bases contributed to population growth in several Alaskan cities.

  The push for statehood had begun early. James Wickersham championed it during his tenure as a congressional delegate. The movement gained its first real momentum after a territorial referendum in 1946, followed by the formation of the Alaska Statehood Committee and the Alaska Constitutional Convention. Statehood was approved by the U.S. Congress on the 7th of July 1958. Alaska was officially proclaimed the 49th state on the 3rd of January 1959, the same year the constitutional delegates' unusual decision to organize the state into boroughs rather than counties took effect. Delegates had specifically wanted to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional county system.

• 5. The Good Friday Earthquake

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  At 5:36 in the evening on the 27th of March 1964, the ground beneath Southcentral Alaska fractured in a way that had no precedent in American experience. The Good Friday earthquake registered a moment magnitude of 9.2, making it the fourth-most-powerful earthquake in recorded history, more than a thousand times as powerful as the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. It lasted 4 minutes and 38 seconds. Six hundred miles of fault ruptured at once, moving up to 60 feet and releasing roughly 500 years of accumulated stress.

  The damage was vast and varied in character. In Anchorage, inadequately earthquake-engineered houses, buildings, and infrastructure along Knik Arm were destroyed or severely damaged by soil liquefaction and landslides. Two hundred miles to the southwest, some areas near Kodiak were permanently raised by 30 feet. Southeast of Anchorage, areas around the head of Turnagain Arm near Girdwood and Portage dropped as much as 8 feet, requiring reconstruction and fill to raise the Seward Highway above the new high tide mark. In Prince William Sound, Port Valdez suffered a massive underwater landslide that killed 32 people. A 27-foot tsunami destroyed the village of Chenega, killing 23 of the 68 people who lived there; the survivors out-ran the wave by climbing to high ground. Tsunamis caused additional damage in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, and Japan, and evidence of motion from the earthquake was reported from as far away as Florida and Texas.

  The response was a mobilization unlike anything Alaska had faced before. The U.S. Army rapidly re-established communications with the lower 48 states and dispatched a convoy to Valdez. President Lyndon B. Johnson declared all of Alaska a major disaster area the day after the quake. A military airlift eventually delivered 2,570,000 pounds of food and supplies. Broadcast journalist Genie Chance stayed on the KENI airwaves over Anchorage for more than 24 continuous hours, coordinating response efforts and connecting resources to needs across the community. She was effectively designated as the public safety officer by the city's police chief.

  In Anchorage, at the urging of geologist Lidia Selkregg, the city and the Alaska State Housing Authority assembled a team of 40 scientists, headed by geology professor Ruth A. M. Schmidt of the University of Alaska Anchorage. The team, called the Engineering and Geological Evaluation Group, clashed with local developers who wanted to rebuild immediately. The scientists wanted to map future dangers first. They produced their report on the 8th of May 1964, just over a month after the earthquake. The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center was formed directly in response to the disaster, and federal disaster relief spending helped keep Alaska financially solvent until the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay. The Alaska National Guard, on orders from the U.S. Defense Department, founded the Alaska Division of Emergency Services to respond to future disasters.

• 6. Oil, Land, and Conservation

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  Oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, and the completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in 1977 transformed the state's finances. Royalty revenues from oil funded large state budgets from 1980 onward. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline can transport and pump up to 2.1 million barrels of crude oil per day, more than any other crude oil pipeline in the United States. Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope remains the second highest-yielding oil field in the country, though production has declined significantly since its peak. More than 80% of the state's revenues are derived from petroleum extraction.

  The oil wealth enabled the Alaska Permanent Fund, a constitutionally authorized appropriation of oil revenues established by voters in 1976. The fund was originally proposed by Governor Keith Miller on the eve of the 1969 Prudhoe Bay lease sale, out of concern that the legislature would spend the entire $900 million proceeds of the sale at once. From its initial principal of $734,000, the fund grew to $50 billion through oil royalties and capital investment. Starting in 1982, dividends from the fund's annual growth have been paid to eligible Alaskans. The dividend ranged from an initial $1,000 in 1982 to $3,269 in 2008, the latter including a one-time $1,200 Resource Rebate. To qualify, residents must have lived in the state for a minimum of 12 months.

  The same era that brought the oil boom also brought a reckoning over land. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 added 53.7 million acres to the National Wildlife Refuge system, parts of 25 rivers to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, 3.3 million acres to National Forest lands, and 43.6 million acres to National Park land. Alaska now contains two-thirds of all American national parklands, and more than half of the state is federally owned. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez hit a reef in Prince William Sound and spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude oil over 1,100 miles of coastline. The tension between development and conservation that the spill crystallized has never resolved: the debate continues today in arguments over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the proposed Pebble Mine. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is the largest wildlife refuge in the world, comprising 16 million acres.

• 7. Who Lives in Alaska

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  Alaska has the highest proportion of Native Americans of any U.S. state, at 22 percent. The Alaska Native Heritage Center celebrates the heritage of Alaska's 11 cultural groups, and the state officially recognizes 20 Indigenous languages. In October 2014, the governor signed a bill giving those languages official status, though they have not been adopted for official use within the government. In May 2024, a bill updated the list, replacing Tanana with Middle Tanana and Lower Tanana and adding Cupig and Wetal, bringing the count to 23 officially recognized languages. Most of Alaska's Native languages belong to either the Eskimo-Aleut or Na-Dene language families. In 2014, nearly all were classified as threatened, shifting, moribund, nearly extinct, or dormant.

  The state's cultural geography is shaped by its distances. The capital, Juneau, is situated on the North American mainland but is not connected by road to the rest of the North American highway system. More than half the state's 740,133 residents live within the metropolitan area of Anchorage, which recorded a population of 291,247 in the 2020 census. The state's most sparsely populated stretches are known as "the Bush," where the majority of small communities are unconnected to any road network. The richest location in Alaska by per capita income is Denali, at $42,245. Delivery of a gallon of milk to many remote villages costs around $3.50, in areas where per capita income can be $20,000 or less.

  Alaska also holds a collection of cultural superlatives that its size tends to generate. The Tongass National Forest in the Southeast is the largest national forest in the United States. Denali, federally designated as Mount McKinley, is the highest mountain in North America. The Bering Glacier, covering 2,008 square miles, is the largest glacier in North America. The Stikine River attracts the largest springtime concentration of American bald eagles in the world. Prominent musicians born in Alaska include singer Jewel, traditional Aleut flautist Mary Youngblood, and the band Portugal. The Man. The official state song, "Alaska's Flag," was adopted in 1955. And the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, running from Anchorage to Nome, remains the most recognized sporting event the state produces, crossing some of the same terrain that soldiers, miners, and Indigenous peoples have traversed for centuries.