Alaska, which the US purchased from Russia more than 150 years ago, will host a high-stakes summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on Friday on the conflict in Ukraine.
The remote state, located only a few miles from Russia on the northwest frontier of the North American continent, still has remnants of Russian influence.
In 1728, while on an expedition for Tsarist Russia, the Danish explorer Vitus Bering made the first voyage across the narrow strait separating Asia and the Americas.
The discovery of what is now known as the Bering Strait revealed the existence of Alaska to the West — however Indigenous people had been living there for thousands of years.
Bering’s expedition kicked off a century of Russian seal hunting, with the first colony set up on the southern Kodiak island.
To capitalize on the profitable fur trade, which frequently caused conflicts with the local Indigenous population, Tsar Paul I founded the Russian-American Company in 1799.
But because the seals and sea otters were overfished by the hunters, their numbers declined, bringing the settlers’ economy down with them.
In 1867, Washington purchased the land from the Russian empire for $7.2 million.
At the time, the purchase of a region more than twice the size of Texas was highly criticized in the US and was even termed “Seward’s folly” after Secretary of State William Seward, who conceived the transaction.
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