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23 - The First Century of US Militarization in Alaska, 1867–1967

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2023

By
Matthew Farish
Edited by
Adrian Howkins  and
Peder Roberts
Adrian Howkins
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Peder Roberts
Affiliation:
University of Stavanger
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Summary

Within the scholarship on ‘U.S. state and empire building in the longue durée’, Alaska plays a surprisingly small role.3 Past the sizable shelf of studies on World War II, the region also vanishes in the literature on the early years of the global Cold War, despite Alaska’s geopolitical prominence and the corresponding effects of additional defence spending, construction, and employment in the period leading up to statehood in 1959.4 Support for (essentially concurrent) statehood in Alaska and Hawai’i was unquestionably ‘entwined with the buildup of both territories as major Cold War defense installations’.5 To rectify that double oversight, and to draw together periods frequently rendered discrete, this chapter uses the United States (US) military, an institution pivotal to the establishment, expansion, and direction of Alaska as a settler colonial society, to stitch together a century of Alaskan history.

Keywords

AlaskacolonialismIndigenousUnited StatesmilitaryhistorydevelopmentArctic
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions , pp. 563 - 592
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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