After its rudimentary beginning in 1749, fur farming in Alaska rose and fell for two centuries. It thrived during the 1890s and again in the 1920s, when rising fur prices caused a stampede for land and breed stock and led to hundreds of farms being s...

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...

"Mission of Change" is an oral history describing various types of change – political, social, cultural, and religious – as seen through the eyes of Father Astruc and Paul Dixon, non-Natives who dedicated their lives to working with the Yup'ik people...

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. Propos...

From the turn of the twentieth century in interior Alaska, dog team mail carriers were charged with maintaining the trail systems and carrying the mail until they were replaced in the late 1930s and '40s by airplane mail service. With the advent and...

First settled in 1915, Anchorage, Alaska, was founded with the American empire in mind. During World War I, it served as a conduit through which coal could be shipped to the Pacific, where the U. S. Navy was engaged with Japan. Decades later, during...

Making up more than ten percent of Alaska's population, Native Alaskans are the state's largest minority group. Yet most non-Native Alaskans know surprisingly little about the histories and cultures of their indigenous neighbors, or about the importa...