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Foreword on the saltwater margins of a northern frontier || William Cronon I t has long been almost a cliché to refer to Alaska as America’s “last frontier.” Many of the attributes that characterized other frontier regions have persisted longer there than almost anywhere else in the nation. As with so many other frontiers, waves of immigrants have mingled with, exploited, and sometimes displaced the indigenous populations who have inhabited these far northern environs for millennia. Natives and newcomers for the past three centuries have found themselves enmeshed in colonial trade networks devoted mainly to extracting natural resources from Alaskan environments for shipment hundreds and thousands of miles away. Like most such peripheral economies, Alaska has undergone periods of intense boom and bust as external demand for its resources has waxed and waned and as the supply of those resources has risen and fallen in turn. Alaska’s population has long been dispersed in small, remote communities and a few larger towns tied to metropolitan centers (places such as San Francisco, Seattle, and eventually Anchorage) with disproportionate influence over the life of the region. Alaskan history can easily be organized according to a series of “resource frontiers”—furs, minerals, oil, fish—whose changing fortunes have mirrored those of the state as a whole. Much of Alaskan politics has revolved around who should chiefly benefit from these resources: natives, local workers and communities, or the capitalists, corporations , and government bureaucrats (many located thousands of miles away) that have exercised control over them. Add to these other phenomena the intense individualism so characteristic of American frontier mythology , along with suspicion of government power coupled with deep reliance on government largesse, and it is not at all hard to see why so many people ix have so easily seen Alaska as the final and most intense expression of American frontier history. Certain episodes of the Alaskan past loom large enough to have become part of standard textbook accounts of American history more generally, though rarely at much length. The original decision to purchase Alaska from Russia in 1867—mocked as Seward’s Folly—gets a brief notice. Perhaps because the photographic record is so extraordinary and the tale-telling of Jack London and Robert Service so compelling, the Klondike Gold Rush has become a set piece as well. (Its story has most recently been retold by Kathryn Morse in her wonderful The Nature of Gold, another volume in this series.) Debates over statehood and the role of Alaska during the Cold War sometimes make it into the textbooks, as do the discovery of North Slope oil and the subsequent controversies over how best to conserve and develop resources on the public lands of this largest of all American states. But if one had to pick a single feature of Alaskan history that has been most important to the largest number of people for the longest time and in the most ways, there cannot be much doubt about what it would be: fish. This is true for many more places than just Alaska, yet somehow the oceans and their many gifts to humanity have almost never received the attention from historians that their intrinsic importance merits. If mentioned at all, the watery two-thirds of the planet enters historical narratives as a relatively uninhabited liquid expanse that both divides and connects human beings whose activities—voyaging, exploring, navigating, trading, raiding, warring, and so on—have led them across it. The sea carries spice traders to distant cornersof theplanet;itfloatsthearmadasof naviesforgreatmilitaryencounters ; it transports commodities hither and yon; it poses scientific puzzles for navigators, mapmakers, and engineers . . . but rarely for more than a few paragraphs. Even the harvested bounty of marine creatures that the sea has so abundantly yielded since time immemorial receives little more than passing mention. Despite their importance, the oceans have almost always been relegated to the saltwater margins of human history. Surprising though it may seem, environmental history has been slow to correct this scholarly blind spot. Arthur McEvoy’s classic The Fisherman’s Problem, which traced the story of California’s fisheries across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stood almost alone in the field for nearly a decade after its publication in 1986. More recently, important new studies have explored the salmon fisheries of the Pacific Northwest, which are among the most defining environmental features of that region: Richard White’s x Foreword [18.223.125.219] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 14:53...

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