front cover of Married to the Empire
Married to the Empire
Three Governors' Wives in Russian America 1829-1864
Susanna Rabow-Edling
University of Alaska Press, 2015
The Russian Empire had a problem. While they had established successful colonies in their territory of Alaska, life in the settlements was anything but civilized. The settlers of the Russian-America Company were drunk, disorderly, and corrupt. Worst of all, they were terrible role models for the Natives, whom the empire saw as in desperate need of moral enlightenment. The empire’s solution? Send in women. In 1829, the Company decreed that any governor appointed after that date had to have a wife, in the hopes that these more pious women would serve as glowing examples of domesticity and bring charm to a brutish territory.

Elisabeth von Wrangell, Margaretha Etholén, and Anna Furuhjelm were three of eight governors' wives who took up this domestic mantle. Married to the Empire tells their stories using their own words and though extraordinary research by Susanna Rabow-Edling. All three were young and newly wed when they left Russia for the furthest outpost of the empire, and all three went through personal and cultural struggles as they worked to adjust to life in the colony. Their trials offer a little-heard female history of Russian Alaska, while illuminating the issues that arose while trying to reconcile expectations of womanhood with the realities of frontier life.
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Melting the Ice Curtain
The Extraordinary Story of Citizen Diplomacy on the Russia-Alaska Frontier
David Ramseur
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988 Friendship Flight reunited Native peoples of common languages and cultures for the first time in four decades. It and other dramatic efforts to thaw what was known as the Ice Curtain launched a thirty-year era of perilous, yet prolific, progress.

Melting the Ice Curtain tells the story of how inspiration, courage, and persistence by citizen-diplomats bridged a widening gap in superpower relations. David Ramseur was a first-hand witness to the danger and political intrigue, having flown on that first Friendship Flight, and having spent thirty years behind the scenes with some of Alaska’s highest officials. As Alaska celebrates the 150th anniversary of its purchase, and as diplomatic ties with Russia become perilous, Melting the Ice Curtain shows that history might hold the best lessons for restoring diplomacy between nuclear neighbors.
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Across Arctic America
Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition
Knud Rasmussen
University of Alaska Press, 1999
Between 1921 and 1924, Knud Rasmussen led a small band of colleagues in a journey of investigation across the top of North America. The full scientific report of that 20,000-mile trek by dog sled from Greenland to Siberia, known to history as the Firth Thule Expedition, fills ten volumes. This single volume, Across Arctic America, is Rasmussen’s own reworking and condensation of his two-volume popular account written in Danish, and gives the essence of his experience of the Arctic and its people.

            It was the people who most captivated the Greenland-born Rasmussen, who had become a virtual adopted son to the Eskimos of the far northern district still known by the name of the trading post he established there, Thule. His first four Thule Expeditions extended the limits of the known world in Greenland solely, but Rasmussen’s Fifth Thule Expedition demonstrated the unity of the Eskimo world from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chukchi Sea, proving the people all shared the same basic language and culture. As historian Terrence Cole notes in his introductory biography, “The intellectual and spiritual life of the people themselves were his primary interest, not simply geographical discovery, and thus even when following the tracks of previous explorers, he found uncharted territory. His basic principle was to first earn the trust of the local people by showing understanding and patience: living with the people and not apart from them, sharing their work and their food….” That was how Rasmussen approached the entire Arctic: he did not live apart from it, skimming over its surface like the fame-seeking polar explorers of the time such as Peary and Cook, but immersed himself in it—so successfully that a Canadian Inuit elder once marveled that he was “the first white man [he had ever seen] who was also an Eskimo.”
            Of most significance to readers today, though, is that Rasmussen was also a noted writer. He wanted to share not just the observations he made but the feelings he experienced, and so in Across Arctic America offered what fellow arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson described as “not only a work of literary charm but also one of the deepest and soundest interpretations” of Eskimo life ever put into a book.
            This volume, published in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the completion of the Fifth Thule Expedition, includes an introduction by Classic Reprint Series editor Terrance Cole and an index.
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Critical Norths
Space, Nature, Theory
Sarah Jaquette Ray
University of Alaska Press, 2017
For millennia, “the North” has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions—empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history—it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change.
 
This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we’ve conceived it—and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region’s human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.
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Coloring the Universe
An Insider's Look at Making Spectacular Images of Space
Travis Rector
University of Alaska Press, 2015
With a fleet of telescopes in space and giant observatories on the ground, professional astronomers produce hundreds of spectacular images of space every year. These colorful pictures have become infused into popular culture and can found everywhere, from advertising to television shows to memes. But they also invite questions: Is this what outer space really looks like? Are the colors real? And how do these images get from the stars to our screens?

Coloring the Universe uses accessible language to describe how these giant telescopes work, what scientists learn with them, and how they are used to make color images. It talks about how otherwise un-seeable rays, such as radio waves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays, are turned into recognizable colors. And it is filled with fantastic images taken in far-away pockets of the universe. Informative and beautiful, Coloring the Universe will give space fans of all levels an insider’s look at how scientists bring deep space into brilliant focus.
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Crooked Road
The Story of the Alaska Highway
David A. Remley
University of Alaska Press, 2008
Crooked Road tells the tale of how the Alaska Highway was built during World War II. David Remley chronicles how Americans and Canadians mapped and built the highway under the 1942 authorization of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who ordered its construction for the joint defense of the United States and Canada. Crooked Road draws upon archival images and oral histories from those who lived in the prior unpaved wilderness and those who regularly drive on the highway today, and ultimately offers a fascinating historical account of the expansion of the American landscape.
 
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Finding True North
First-Hand Stories of the Booms that Built Modern Alaska
Molly Rettig
University of Alaska Press, 2021

Melting sea ice and rumbling volcanoes. Sled dogs racing through unnamed valleys.

These were the images that came to mind when Molly Rettig moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to work as a reporter at the local newspaper. An avid environmentalist, she couldn’t wait to explore the vast, untamed spaces that had largely been paved over on the east coast. But when her 72-year-old neighbor, Clutch, invites her on a tour of his gold mine—an 800-foot tunnel blasted into the side of his house–she begins to question many of her ideas about Alaska, and about herself. 

In Finding True North, Rettig takes us on a gripping journey through Alaska's past that brings alive the state's magnificent country and its quirky, larger-than-life characters. She meets a trapper who harvests all she needs from the land, a bush pilot who taught himself how to fly, and an archaeologist who helped build an oil pipeline through pristine wilderness. While she learns how airplanes, mines, and oil fields have paved the way for newcomers like herself, she also stumbles upon a bigger question: what has this quest for Alaska’s natural resources actually cost, and how much more is at stake?

This is a book about all the ways wild places teach us about ourselves. Rettig writes both playfully and honestly about how one place can be many things to many people—and how all of it can be true.

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Building in the North
Eb Rice
University of Alaska Press, 2008
Building in the North is a fully updated edition of the classic work by Elbert F. Rice, a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who with a steady supply of wit, charm, and his own hands-on experience helped to invent Northern engineering. Easily readable and accessible to anyone with a healthy sense of humor and a willingness to live in the beautiful North, this guide is essential for those who dream of building that longed-for cabin in the woods—or simply find themselves needing to learn to cope with the threat of permafrost in a frigid climate. Illustrated with Rice’s own drawings and filled with invaluable folk knowledge, this contribution to science and human experience in the Great North will delight adventurers and natives alike.
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Alaska Native Cultures and Issues
Responses to Frequently Asked Questions
Libby Roderick
University of Alaska Press, 2010

Making up more than ten percent of Alaska's population, Native Alaskans are the state's largest minority group. Yet most non-Native Alaskans know surprisingly little about the histories and cultures of their indigenous neighbors, or about the important issues they face. This concise book compiles frequently asked questions and provides informative and accessible responses that shed light on some common misconceptions. With responses composed by scholars within the represented communities and reviewed by a panel of experts, this easy-to-read compendium aims to facilitate a deeper exploration and richer discussion of the complex and compelling issues that are part of Alaska Native life today.

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Finding Mars
Ned Rozell
University of Alaska Press, 2011
Finding Mars is an interwoven tale of science, travel, and adventure, as science writer Ned Rozell accompanies permafrost researcher—and inveterate wanderer—Kenji Yoshikawa on a 750-mile trek by snowmobile through the Alaska wilderness.  Along the way, Rozell learns about Yoshikawa’s fascinating life, from his boyhood in Tokyo to the youthful wanderlust that led him to push a wheeled cart across the Sahara, ski to the South Pole, and take a sailboat into the frozen reaches of the Arctic Ocean, spending a winter frozen in the ice near Barrow. It’s an always on-the-move account of a man driven not just by the desire to fill in the blank spots on a map, but also to learn everything he can about them—and a ringing testament to the power of science, enthusiasm, and individual inspiration.
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Plantlore/Dena'ina K'et'una
An Ethnobotany of the Dena'ina People of Southcentral Alaska
Priscilla Russel Kari
University of Alaska Press, 2020
When Chris McCandless, immortalized in Into the Wild, headed into the Alaska wilderness, one of the books he took with him was Tanaina Plantlore, which he used to identify edible plants. While the book and subsequent movie has brought attention to the book for more than a decade, it draws on a thousand of years of knowledge. The Dena’ina (also called the Tanaina) Athabascan peoples in southcentral Alaska have made use of the varied plant life that grows in interior Alaska for generations and Tanaina Plantlore collects this extensve knowledge, giving phsycial and environmental descriptions with photographs to aid in identification.

This book is the culmination of more than a decade of ethnobotanical study and provides accounts of the traditional lore associated with these plants based on a wealth of interviews with Dena’ina people. This new edition includes new graphical content consolidating practical plant information and traditional uses.
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I Thought There Would Be More Wolves
Poems
Sara Ryan
University of Alaska Press, 2021
After moving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, poet Sara Ryan found herself immersed in the isolated spaces of the North: the cold places that never thawed, the bleak expanses of snow. These poems have teeth, bones, and blood—they clack and bruise and make loud sounds. They interrogate self-preservation, familial history, extinction, taxidermy, and animal and female bodies. In between these lines, in warm places where blood collects, animals stay hidden and hunted, a girl looks loneliness dead in the eye, and wolves come out of the woods to run across the frozen water of Lake Superior.
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