Alaska entered the Union on January 3, 1959, to become the forty-ninth
state. Its name means “great land,” and its motto is “North to the
Future.”
Alaska lies in the northwest corner of North America and is separated from the contiguous (adjacent) forty-eight states by Canada. It is
the largest of the fifty states, with a total area of 591,004 square miles
(1,530,699 square kilometers). Alaska occupies 16 percent of all U.S. land.
The state has a number of offshore islands, including Saint Lawrence
and others in the Bering Sea, Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, and
the Aleutian Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Between ten thousand and forty thousand years ago, America’s aboriginal peoples crossed a land bridge connecting Siberia with America.
These hunter-gatherers from Asia dispersed and became three distinct
groups: Aleut, Eskimo, and Indian.
Russian voyagers landed in Alaska in 1741, and in 1784 the first permanent Russian settlement was established on Kodiak Island. Russia sold
its Alaskan territories to the United States in 1867 for $7.2 million, or
two cents per acre. It became known as the Alaska Purchase.
Economy
The gold rush in the late 1880s hastened Alaska’s economic development. That progress was overshadowed in 1898, when gold was discovered in Canada’s Klondike region. Hundreds of thousands of people
hoping to strike it rich came to the Yukon River valley and other Alaskan
regions, including the Arctic. When the Alaska Railroad was built in
1914, even the most remote wilderness area became accessible.
Alaska depends heavily upon oil for its economy; 85 percent of its
revenue comes from oil. When overproduction in the Middle East drove
down the price of oil late in the twentieth century, the state’s revenue declined by two-thirds, and the state lost twenty thousand jobs between
1985 and 1989.
In March 1989 the oil tanker Exxon Valdez hit a reef and, in one of
the worst pollution disasters worldwide, spilled nearly eleven million gallons of crude oil that contaminated 1,285 miles of shoreline. The affected areas included Prince William Sound and its wildlife sanctuary,
the Gulf of Alaska, and the Alaska Peninsula. The Exxon Corporation
was fined more than $1 billion in civil and criminal penalties.
Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has been the subject of national debate since the 1990s. Some people have favored opening the twenty-million-acre wilderness to oil drilling, a move that failed
to receive enough support from Congress to pass until 2005. At that
time, both the Senate and the House of Representatives voted to approve
drilling as part of a larger bill to reduce federal spending. Many Senate
members remained committed to preventing any drilling, however, and
they threatened a filibuster (a delay tactic used by a Senate minority to
prevent the passage of a bill) if the text regarding drilling in the ANWR
was not removed. The text was removed and, as of early 2008, drilling
was still up for debate.
Unlike most states whose populations vote either Republican or
Democrat, Alaska is overwhelmingly (59 percent) unaffiliated with either party. In spite of this, in presidential elections since 1968, the state
has voted Republican ten consecutive times.
At the time of its statehood induction, Alaska was almost completely
dependent upon the federal government for its economic stability.
During the 1970s, its petroleum industry developed, and the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline brought both money and people to the
state. Other important industries include commercial fishing and
tourism. Tourism brought in $1.5 billion in 2003, which was 5 percent
of Alaska’s gross state product.