[100
years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a
National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and
other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]
A few
examples of why it’s not at all foolish to consider the specifics of how, when,
and why America’s territory expanded.
Let me get
this out of the way at the start: despite having had the singular dishonor of
vaulting Sarah
Palin, and her erroneous
and destructive visions of American identity and history, onto the
national stage, Alaska is a very welcome part of our 21st century
American community. Everything I wrote about Sitka in
this post on complex and instructive American places is
equally true of the state overall; it opens up landscapes, histories, and
communities without which we’d be a less rich and diverse nation. Yet we can’t
fully appreciate much of what Alaska brings and means if we don’t better
understand the contexts of its addition to our nation: the complex
history of Russian imperialism in the region; the pre-Civil War arguments over
international expansion that led to the first consideration of buying Alaska,
under the Buchanan Administration; and the very divided
Reconstruction-era moment and Johnson Administration during which Seward finally
gained approval for that purchase in 1867 (and received the funds in 1868), and
which produced the very vocal and
famous critiques of the acquisition.
At least
as complex, and far more explicitly dark and tragic, is the history surrounding
the American “acquisition” of Hawai’i a few decades later. My January 25th
Memory Day nominee, Charles Reed Bishop [NOTE: I’ve since changed that
nomination for these reasons], illustrates some of the powerful and inspiring
sides to American connections to Hawai’i in the mid-19th century;
yet at the same time, Bishop’s
struggles to hold onto his late wife’s ancestral lands (on which they had
started their school) in the face of pressures from subsequent
settlers and big business to acquire that land exemplify the kinds of forces
that led
directly to America’s annexation of Hawai’i. There are few historical figures
whose stories reflect more poorly on the US’s actions than Queen
Liliuokalani (although she has plenty of competition, of course), and we can’t
possibly understand the place’s history or meaning outside of a much fuller
inclusion of her in our national histories and narratives. Such an inclusion
wouldn’t make it impossible to appreciate the state’s natural beauties, nor its
most famous contribution to 21st
century America—but it would force us to recognize at which price those beauties,
and the resources they include, were bought, and what that reveals about late
19th century American imperialisms.
If
Hawai’i’s history is one of the nation’s most dramatic and tragic, the evolving
story of Maine would seem to be one of the quietest and most diplomatic.
Although the area had been part of the United States (and specifically of
Massachusetts) since the
Revolution, and had gained its own statehood in 1820, it had
throughout those years served as a flashpoint for continuing conflicts between
the US and England. Those
conflicts turned into the so-called “Aroostook War” (or Pork and Beans War) of
1839, a bloodless struggle over the state’s borders and resources that
was resolved through diplomacy three years later with the Webster-Ashburton
Treaty. Besides revealing how tense relations between the US and its
former mother country remained throughout the first half of the 19th
century, that Treaty also illustrates some of the many other issues to which
that relationship connected—besides settling the Maine/New Brunswick border,
the treaty also stipulated the creation of a joint American and British naval
force for the sole purpose of patrolling the African coast and “suppressing the
Slave Trade,” enforcing laws that
had been on the books in both nations for decades but which clearly
remained an issue. Engaging with the history of Maine, then, allows us to
better understand multiple complex and crucial, Early Republic international
influences and relationships.
Next
AlaskaStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?
