Stephen Haycox. Battleground Alaska

Even by the high standards of the American West, Alaska has a contentious relationship with the federal government. No other state, argues Stephen Haycox, has been more “antistatist” (15) by temperament and tradition than the forty-ninth, and in Battleground Alaska: Fighting Federal Power in America’s Last Wilderness he sets out to explain why. The answer involves not only an understanding of Alaska’s path to statehood, but also an appreciation of its vastness, its geographic isolation, and its environmental endowments. Perhaps nowhere else in the country has politics and environment blended as thoroughly as in Alaska. Its electoral and legislative history and its land-use history are almost the same thing, and one of the strengths of Haycox’s book is his integration of both along with the state’s complex Indigenous histories. Far from large markets, and saddled with high transportation costs and a small population, Alaska was never fated for economic glory. But white Alaskans long ached for levels of growth and standards of living equal to those in the lower forty-eight, and they saw the aggressive development of the region’s natural resources as key. The federal government earned their ire early on by failing (in their eyes) to facilitate that growth while also, contradictorily, interfering too much with it. Statehood emerged as a panacea; it would rapidly settle questions of federal, state, and private land titles, boosters said, and allow Alaska to quickly and thoroughly exploit its share with a minimum of outside intrusion.

Economic history · Geography · Government (linguistics) · Indigenous · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · State (computer science) · Wilderness · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies