Alaska

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.