ABSTRACT
As a political geographic space, the American Arctic in Alaska has two histories. It has an early history as part of the Russian empire and a second history as a territory of the US. The American Arctic was discovered, explored and mapped by Imperial Russia and its representatives. The US entered the stage of the emerging geopolitics of the Arctic, facilitating the preservation of the notion of the freedom of the sea both in their declination of sovereignty over the North Pole, but in their defeated challenge to sovereignty over the Bering Sea. Although Alaska finally became a US state, the exigencies of the Interwar Years and Cold War era policies caused the federal government to retain ownership over more than half of all land in Alaska. Thus, US Arctic policy during the Cold War saw the continuation of similar objectives for the US government, especially in areas of national defence, freedom of the seas and mutually beneficial international cooperation.
