BiblioVault - Books about Alaska

Raven and River

Nancy White Carlstrom

University of Alaska Press, 2011

Raven and River leads young readers on a fantastical journey with a raven across the icy Alaska landscape on the verge of spring. Along the way, the raven’s sonorous cry wakes a cast of sleeping woodland creatures, including a bear, a beaver, a hare, and a squirrel—all of whom join him in imploring the still-frozen river to melt and thereby initiate the change of seasons. Packed with information and featuring vibrant full-color illustrations by Jon Van Zyle, Raven and River brings to life these two important harbingers of Alaska’s spring.

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Recent Mammals of Alaska

Stephen O. MacDonald and Joseph A. Cook

University of Alaska Press, 2009

From the polar bear and the gray wolf to the walrus and river otter, there are 115 species of mammals in Alaska that have never been fully catalogued until now. Biologists Joseph A. Cook and Stephen O. MacDonald have compiled here the first comprehensive guide to all of Alaska’s mammals, big and small, endearing and ferocious.

Through extensive fieldwork and research the authors have produced a unique and authoritative reference. Detailed entries for each species include distribution and taxonomic information, status, habitat, and fossil history. Appendices include quick reference listings of mammal distribution by region, specimen locations, conservation status, and the incidence of Pleistocene mammals. The guide is generously illustrated with line drawings by Alaskan artist W. D. Berry and includes several maps indicating populations and locations of species.

Mammals of Alaska will be an accessible, easy to use source for scholars and hobbyists alike.

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The Rising and the Rain

Collected Poems

John Straley

University of Alaska Press, 2008

John Straley crafts here a collection of poems that pay homage to his home of the Pacific Northwest and southeastern Alaska. His narrative poetry is infused with sharp wit and delicate details, as he meditates on the natural world of the Pacific coastline and its rhythmic seasonal patterns, cycles of rain, and rich abundance of earth. Straley intertwines the personal and political to create elegies of refreshing honesty and universal scope, making The Rising and Rain a powerful work by one of the top emerging poets today.

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Russian Refuge

Religion, Migration, and Settlement on the North American Pacific Rim

Susan Wiley Hardwick

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In 1987, when victims of religious persecution were finally allowed to leave Russia, a flood of immigrants landed on the Pacific shores of North America. By the end of 1992 over 200,000 Jews and Christians had left their homeland to resettle in a land where they had only recently been considered "the enemy."

Russian Refuge is a comprehensive account of the Russian immigrant experience in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia since the first settlements over two hundred years ago. Susan Hardwick focuses on six little-studied Christian groups—Baptists, Pentecostals, Molokans, Doukhobors, Old Believers, and Orthodox believers—to study the role of religion in their decisions to emigrate and in their adjustment to American culture.

Hardwick deftly combines ethnography and cultural geography, presenting narratives and other data collected in over 260 personal interviews with recent immigrants and their family members still in Russia. The result is an illuminating blend of geographic analysis with vivid portrayals of the individual experience of persecution, migration, and adjustment.

Russian Refuge will interest cultural geographers, historians, demographers, immigration specialists, and anyone concerned with this virtually untold chapter in the story of North American ethnic diversity.

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Russians in Alaska

1732-1867

Lydia Black

University of Alaska Press, 2004

This definitive work, the crown jewel in the distinguished career of Russian America scholar Lydia T. Black, presents a comprehensive overview of the Russian presence in Alaska. Drawing on extensive archival research and employing documents only recently made available to scholars, Black shows how Russian expansion was the culmination of centuries of social and economic change.
Black’s work challenges the standard perspective on the Russian period in Alaska as a time of unbridled exploitation of Native inhabitants and natural resources. Without glossing over the harsher aspects of the period, Black acknowledges the complexity of relations between Russians and Native peoples.
She chronicles the lives of ordinary men and women—the merchants and naval officers, laborers and clergy—who established Russian outposts in Alaska. These early colonists carried with them the Orthodox faith and the Russian language; their legacy endures in architecture and place names from Baranof Island to the Pribilofs.
This deluxe volume features fold-out maps and color illustrations of rare paintings and sketches from Russian, American, Japanese, and European sources—many have never before been published. An invaluable source for historians and anthropologists, this accessible volume brings to life a dynamic period in Russian and Alaskan history. A tribute to Black’s life as a scholar and educator, Russians in Alaska will become a classic in the field.

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Russia's American Colony

S. Frederick Starr, ed.

Duke University Press, 1986

American, Canadian, and Soviet scholars gathered in Sitka under the auspices of the Kenan Institute to review and reinterpret the history of tsarist Russia's colonial outpost in Alaska. The result is this comprehensive examination of that history, which goes beyond the traditional concentration on political and diplomatic history by treating the economy, society, and culture of Alaska during the Russian period.

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