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Article: Alaska
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ALASKA
ALASKA.
For most of its history as a U.S. possession, Alaska was known as the "last frontier," the last part of the country where would-be pioneers could go to live out the American dream of freedom and self-sufficiency through hard work and ingenuity. But with the rise of environmental consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, that notion subsided. Alaska became America's "last wilderness," the last place in America with vast stretches of undeveloped, unpopulated land. In 1980 Congress designated 50 million acres of the state as wilderness, doubling the size of the national wilderness system.
Few Americans knew much about the region when the United States purchased Alaska from ...