Alaska, 1987. In a world where Alaska is still a Russian possession, charter captain Grigoriy Grigorievich has a stained past-as a major in the Czar's Troika Guard he was cashiered for disobeying a direct order. Now, ten years later, Grisha charters out to a Cossack and discovers his past has not only caught up with him, but is about to violently change his future, and the future of all nine of the nations of North America as well. Revolution against an oppressor, continent-wide alliances, and an epic struggle of a people to be free-spanning Alaska from the Southeastern Inside Passage to the frozen Yukon river, this is an epic tale of one man's journey of redemption and courage to face old fears, new challenges, and help birth a new nation.

From 1741 until Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867, the Russian empire claimed territory and peoples in North America. In this book, Ilya Vinkovetsky examines how Russia governed its only overseas colony, illustrating how the colony fit into and diverged from the structures developed in the otherwise contiguous Russian empire. Russian America was effectively transformed from a remote extension of Russia's Siberian frontier penetrated mainly by Siberianized Russians into an ostensibly modern overseas colony operated by Europeanized Russians. Under the rule of the Russian-American Company, the colony was governed on different terms than the rest of the empire, a hybrid of elements carried over from Siberia and imported from rival colonial systems. Its economic, labor, and social organization reflected Russian hopes for Alaska, as well as the numerous limitations, such as its vast territory and pressures from its multiethnic residents, it imposed. This approach was particularly evident in Russian strategies to convert the indigenous peoples of Russian America into loyal subjects of the Russian Empire. Vinkovetsky looks closely at Russian efforts to acculturate the native peoples, including attempts to predispose them to be more open to the Russian political and cultural influence through trade and Russian Orthodox Christianity. Bringing together the history of Russia, the history of colonialism, and the history of contact between native peoples and Europeans on the American frontier, this work highlights how the overseas colony revealed the Russian Empire's adaptability to models of colonialism.

A compact, fast-moving social and political history that brings to vivid life the story of Alaska's early days. Its name was not Alaska until we bought it in 1867. Until then it was Russian America. Americans at large are apt to forget that our 49th state, Alaska, was first explored and settled by the Russians. They left a definite mark on the vast Northwest. -- Amazon.

The Russian Empire once extended deep into America: in 1818 Russia's furthest outposts were in California and Hawaii. The dreamer behind this great Imperial vision was Nikolai Rezanov ? diplomat, adventurer, courtier, millionaire and gambler. His quest to plant Russian colonies from Siberia to California led him to San Francisco, where he was captivated by Conchita, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Spanish Governor, who embodied his dreams of both love and empire. From the glittering court of Catherine the Great to the wilds of the New World, Matthews conjures a brilliantly original portrait of one of Russia's most eccentric Empire-builders.

For half of the twentieth century, there were two superpowers in the world and a gulf of silence between them. Knowledge of Russian culture was based on propaganda and rumour, and their knowledge of the West was no better. When the Soviet Union fell, Russians began to travel to America more regularly, and what they discovered was a very different place to the one they had imagined, but, at the same time, not exactly the one that Americans think they know. This collection of beautifully written and entertaining literary essays by a wide range of Russian writers - young and old, funny and sombre, angry and celebratory, many being translated for the first time - offers readers a unique chance to see Americans in a whole new light, to question how the American dream stands up to the American reality, and to experience the wit and generosity of today's Russian writers.

Alaska, 1987. In a world where Alaska is still a Russian possession, charter captain Grigoriy Grigorievich has a stained past—as a major in the Czar’s Troika Guard he was cashiered for disobeying a direct order. Now, ten years later, Grisha charters out to a Cossack and discovers his past has not only caught up with him, but is about to violently change his future, and the future of all nine of the nations of North America as well. Revolution against an oppressor, continent-wide alliances, and an epic struggle of a people to be free–spanning Alaska from the Southeastern Inside Passage to the frozen Yukon river, this is an epic tale of one man’s journey of redemption and courage to face old fears, new challenges, and help birth a new nation.

The Tlingits, the largest Indian group in Alaska, have lived in Alaska's coastal southwestern region for centuries and first met non-Natives in 1741 during an encounter with the crew of the Russian explorer Alexei Chirikov. The volatile and complex connections between the Tlingits and their Russian neighbors, as well as British and American voyagers and traders, are the subject of this classic work, first published in Russian and now revised and updated for this English-language edition. Andrei Val'terovich Grinev bases his account on hundreds of documents from archives in Russia and the United States; he also relies on official reports, the notes of travelers, the investigations of historians and ethnographers, museum collections, atlases, illustrations, and photographs.