The Significance of America's Maritime North
While Alaska's "Last Frontier" moniker is popular, it remains historically problematic. The frontier interpretation ignores a history that came eastward from Asia. And, when historians position Alaska as a periphery of western expansion, they exclude Alaska's 30,000-year-old history as a geological, ecological, and cultural bridge connecting America to two trans-global spheres: the Circumpolar North and the Pacific Rim. Explaining Alaska History through a maritime lens dismantles Alaska's frontier myth and moves the Maritime North from the fringe to a central position in American history. Ultimately, the Alaska Maritime Heritage Preservation Program will support projects that increase awareness of Alaska's significance to the maritime heritage of the United States.

Embedded in Alaska's coastal communities are layers of evidence documenting a human history that began with the retreat of Pleistocene glaciers and the return of salmon, sea mammals, and other marine resources that recolonized a post-ice age landscape. Along coastlines and rivers that endure a constant cycle of freeze and thaw are eroding middens, villages, fish traps, and bidarkas. Examined with oral testimony, cultural ceremony, and traditional knowledge, these resources bear witness to the marine subsistence strategies and ecological realms of the past that explain Alaska's diverse indigenous landscapes and ground-truth theories on the peopling of the Americas.

Unlike familiar trails that penetrated the American West, European expansion into Alaska followed routes through the Asian Far East. Like Columbus, who connected continents on both shores of the Atlantic, Vitus Bering linked a vast waterscape where "imperial and personal contests played out in isolated bays and coastlines." Russian fur-hunters sought valuable sea otter pelts along coastal Alaska, while the Russian Orthodox Church sought converts. Both relied on local Native people and their knowledge of the sea for hunting, food, and transportation. Russian settlements in the Aleutians, Kodiak, Resurrection Bay, and Sitka left a legacy of colonization preserved in maritime resources, including remnants of pier foundations, shipyards, artels, redoubts, chapels, and shipwrecks. Captain Cook's voyages in the 1770s and the subsequent convergence of European explorers and exploiters -- British, Spanish, Russian, French, and American -- transformed Alaskan seaports into international hubs connecting the Far North to the emerging Pacific World. These maritime traders plied the waters for profitable commodities while bringing cultural, environmental, and biological changes to those regions. Investigations into early maritime trade challenge the entrenched historical interpretation that Alaska served simply as the nation's last frontier rather than America's link to the World.

The expansion of New England whaling into the Arctic for sperm and bowhead whales in the 1840s led to the commercial entry of the United States into the Maritime North, prompting American territorial interests in Alaska. Innovations such as trypots allowed Atlantic whalers to voyage further and render blubber at sea. Decades of whaling nearly drove the bowhead to extinction, impacting the Inupiat's 1000-year whale-dependent lifeway. Arctic whaling served as a backdrop for the last shot of the Civil War and presented fugitive slaves arriving in New Bedford an escape route, characterized by maritime historians as the "Underground Railroad Afloat." In 1894, Brigadier General Frederick Funston described an Arctic whaling camp as "more cosmopolitan than any other place on the globe." This underscores maritime curator and historian Joel Stone's observation that "the maritime community has always been the earth's most diverse and cosmopolitan population, going back to the days of seagoing vessels where Caucasians, Asians, and Africans worked together for centuries."

To Interior Secretary William Seward, Alaska served as a stepping-stone, linking America to Asia and, importantly, represented new markets for the industrializing North, which led to the transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States in 1867. Mercantile fortunes made during the California gold rush set the stage for Alaska Commercial Company to make millions harvesting Pribilof fur seals and profited even more by selling supplies to prospectors during Alaska's gold rush. Commercial steamships and riverboats transported hopeful miners from West Coast ports up the Yukon, Tanana, and Nenana rivers where river tributaries became roads and boats were a miner's only vehicles. Gilded Age salmon canneries -- with pulsating machines, efficient fishing, processing, canning and marketing methods, and a multiethnic labor force -- represented the Industrial Revolution of the North. This pursuit introduced new boats and mechanized assembly lines, replaced skilled workers with steam-powered machines, built electrical, water, and communications systems, and applied science to manage fish runs. Salmon packers sold canned fish to markets worldwide through a large-scale transportation network. Use of traps left few fish and little profit to local Alaskans, prompting a political fight for America's 49th star.

Meanwhile, the federal government built lighthouses, charted the coastline, funded harbors, and, with growing international tensions, established military bases along the coast as part of a defense system to protect against possible invasion. With the Aleutian Campaign's proximity to the Pacific Theater, the battles of Attu and Kiska command high profile in nationally significant maritime history. Likewise, the little-known removal of Unangax people under Executive Order 9066 and their wartime internment in abandoned canneries warrant historic evaluation and stand out as a difficult maritime topic worthy of public education and mindful interpretation. Conversely, oil-soaked sea otters during the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill sparked a 24-hour news cycle and symbolized the nation's modern environmental movement.

Alaskans continue to make a living from the sea. Dutch Harbor is the largest fishing port in the nation, Kodiak shelters the largest fleet of fishing boats on the west coast, and Bristol Bay's sockeye runs are the largest on Earth. Tourism, one of Alaska's main economic engines, is largely driven by people opting for time on the water: from kayaking in quiet bays to cruising in city-sized ships. Ninety percent of Alaskans receive consumer goods shipped in containers from global suppliers. Importantly, as climate change causes Arctic ice to thin, the famed Northwest Passage will open to marine shipping and cruise ships, reinforcing Alaska's link to the world and increasing our vitality nationwide. Each of these aspects of Alaska contains a legacy of tangible maritime heritage significant to our nation. Significantly, they serve as contexts to better interpret, evaluate, and understand Alaska's rich maritime resources on a national and international scale.