The Crimean War and the Emergence of Proposals for the Sale of Russian America, 1853-1861

Abstract

At least a dozen serious articles and half a dozen books have been published in English on the Russian sale of Russian America and the American purchase of Territory (which are not the same thing, of course). pioneer work was Frank A. Golder's The Purchase of Alaska (American Historical Review, XXV [1920], 411-425), the first to be based upon Russian archival documents, although they were limited to the diplomatic correspondence between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its emissaries in the United States. In 1936 the Soviet Union presented Washington with forty-five documents concerning the cession; most have been translated in whole or in part in David Hunter Miller's Treaty (Kingston, Ont., 1981), and they were used by Victor J. Farrar in his rather brief Annexation of Russian America to the United States (Washington, D.C., 1937). Archie W. Shiels's Purchase of (College, Alaska, 1967) is largely a compilation of selected primary and secondary sources, mostly Sumner's three-hour speech during the ratification debate in the U.S. Senate; Howard I. Kushner, in Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American-Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867 (Westport, Conn., 1975), has treated the topic within