Tue, November 12, 2013
In our ongoing series “Alaska Board Games,” this week we bring you adventures in northern travel.First up, “Round the World Fliers” (circa 1925):Unlike every other board game that depicts Alaska in the conventional Mercator fashion, this game takes a circumpolar view that situates Alaska as part of a global aerial route. Only with the advent of air travel at the time of the game’s production was such a view conceptualized in the popular imagination. Here’s a close-up of the Alaska...
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Mon, November 04, 2013
By Anjuli GranthamThe Alaska Commercial Company is indisputably one of the most important businesses in the history of Alaska. A recent acquisition by Kodiak’s Baranov Museum helps Alaska’s museums and historical societies to better understand and exhibit this history. Alaska, 1888. Images courtesy Kodiak Historical Society/ Baranov MuseumThe Baranov Museum recently purchased a map from 1888, showing all of the Alaska Commercial Company’s trading stores and listing all known settlements within AC’s trading districts. Also included on the map are...
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Sat, November 02, 2013
From the Alaska State Archives comes news of the completion of the Exxon Valdez Litigation Records Project. The two-year project appraised and organized 3,500 boxes of Alaska Department of Law court case records, ultimately selecting 918 boxes for permanent preservation. The collection is now organized and its catalog record posted at WorldCat: www.worldcat.org/oclc/856591471 From the Archives’s announcement: “Project staff identified about 2,700 boxes in Juneau that do not have permanent value, and provided appraisal guidelines for both permanent and nonpermanent...
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Tue, October 29, 2013
By Laura Samuelson, Director, Carrie M. McLain Memorial MuseumFor the last five weeks of Nome’s brief summer, the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum has been pleased to present excerpts from the diary of Wilfred A. McDaniel Sr. Wilfred and his brother Ed were two of the 20,000 Argonauts who streamed to the Nome Gold Rush in 1900. We are grateful to Wilfred’s daughter Irene McDaniel and her husband Robert Johnson as well as son Wilfred Jr. and Lois McDaniel who...
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Tue, October 22, 2013
By Laura Samuelson, Director, Carrie M. McLain Memorial MuseumWith less and less hours of daylight, everything is freezing especially the Brothers McDaniel. Do we stay or go? Spend the winter in a tent at -20F or go home to sunny San Jose, California and return next June. Which would you choose?? ...ALASKA BECKONSBy Wilfred A. McDaniel“How cold is it?” Ed inquired, as I proceeded to get the breakfast, after a chilly night. I looked at the thermometer hanging outside, over...
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