Sun, January 10, 2021
On December 30, 2020, Alaska's own Elizabeth Peratrovich was the featured image in the Google logo. According to Google: The Doodle, illustrated by Sitka, Alaska-based guest artist Michaela Goade, celebrates Alaska Native civil rights champion Elizabeth Peratrovich, who played an instrumental role in the 1945 passage of the first anti-discrimination law in the United States. On this day in 1941, after encountering an inn door sign that read “No Natives Allowed,” Peratrovich and her husband–both of Alaska’s Indigenous Tlingit tribe–helped...
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Sun, January 10, 2021
The History Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks is pleased to announce a new course titled North American Energy History being taught this Spring 2021 semester by Dr. Philip Wight. They are looking for students to join the course in these last final days of class registration before the new semester starts. North American Energy History is an upper-level history course that examines how energy resources, regimes, and transitions have fueled human history. Over the course of millennia, humans...
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Mon, October 19, 2020
The Journal of Western Archives is pleased to announce the publication of a new article: "Will the Last Archivist in Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights: Value and the National Archives." Authors Sarah Buchanan and Megan Llewellyn from the University of Missouri discuss the decision to close the Seattle branch of the National Archives earlier this year. We hope that you find it interesting. The article can be accessed at digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol11/iss1/7.
Mon, October 19, 2020
The Year Everything Changed: The 1972 Shuttle Bus Decision in Mount McKinley National Park. Tourism numbers at Denali National Park dropped this last summer due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The park projected between 50-60 thousand visitors. The last time Denali had so few tourists the park had a different name, private automobiles could still drive the length of the road, and Richard Nixon was President—it was the early 1970s. It was an era of big change in Denali. Read more...
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Mon, October 19, 2020
The Sea Otters Of Amchitka (1959) Richard Ravalli, Associate Professor, History Department, William Jessup University, Rocklin, California During the coronavirus lockdown, I had the opportunity to work via e-mail with Angela Schmidt of the Alaska Film Archives at University of Alaska, Fairbanks. I was interested in the archive’s copy of the 1959 nature film The Sea Otters of Amchitka, produced by Thorne Films of Boulder, Colorado and shot by naturalist H. Robert Krear. It is the first completed documentary about...
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