First and second editions published under title: Alaska : a history of the 49th state.

Introduction : looking backward and forward -- The great land and its native peoples: Alaska's prehistory : the land and the first Americans debate -- Alaska's ancestral Native peoples -- ATTCKA : RUSSIAN ALASKA: Russian expansion into Siberia and exploration of North America -- The second Kamchatka expedition -- The early Russian fur trade -- The age of Alexander A. Baranov, 1790-1818 -- Russian naval rule, 1818-67 -- The sale of Russian America -- U.S. Territorial Alaska: American settlement of Alaska : the Army, Treasury Department, and Navy phase, 1867-84 -- The great Gold Rush and its aftermath -- Normalcy, the Depression, and the New Deal -- Alaska's strategic role in World War II -- Ramifications of war : evacuations and censorship -- The Cold War -- The State of Alaska: Alaska's rocky road to statehood -- Managing Alaska's oil resources -- Transition to statehood -- Alaska's oil economy in the 1970s and 1980s -- Native land claims -- The Native regional corporations -- Land claims and land conservation -- The oil boom -- The oil industry matures -- Modern Alaska: The unconventional Walter "Wally" J. Hickel -- The Knowles Years, 1994-2002 -- Into the twenty-first century -- Appendices: Commanders in Alaska and effective dates of command : composition and tours of duty of the Alaska garrisons -- Important placer gold discoveries -- Federal District Court judges before statehood -- Delegates to Congress -- Alaska's population, 1880-2003 -- The governors of Alaska -- Native regional corporations.

"Alaska: A History provides a full chronological survey of the region's and state's history, including the Russian period; the territory's painfully attenuated quest for statehood; the precedent-setting Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which compensated Native Americans for their losses; the effect of the oil industry and the trans-Alaska pipeline on the economy; the Exxon Valdez oil spill; and Alaska politics through the early 2000s."

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