ABSTRACT
Fort Ross, the Russian-American Company settlement on the Sonoma coast, has been preserved as a California State Historic Park since its acquisition from the local ranching family of George Washington Call in 1903 by the California Landmarks League, and its subsequent donation to the State of California in 1906 (Sakovich 1998:27). Using this historic location as a focal point, the link to the Russian presence in early nineteenth-century California was maintained, thanks especially to the outreach of former ranger-curator John C. McKenzie, who corresponded widely with scholars in Russia and Alaska, maintaining ties even during the restricted years of the Cold War. Scholarship on this portion of the history of Russian America resulted in international conferences in 1979, 1987, and 2010 (Kidd 2013; Pierce 1990b; Starr 1987), each held in Sitka, Alaska, as well as the Irkutsk Conference on Russian America in 2007 (Afanasieva-Medvedeva et al. 2007); these allowed face-to-face meetings among scholars from several nations, principally Russia, the United States, and Canada. The change in government in the early 1990s that converted the old Soviet Union to the Russian Federation has marked an ever greater period of interest and cooperation between the United States and Russia in the study of this piece of Russian colonial history. In addition to the conferences mentioned above, there have been two notable traveling exhibits, organized by Barbara Sweetland Smith of Anchorage, that made available some of the remarkable artifacts, drawings, and paintings that Russian visitors used to document the exotic land of California. However, we have not been as fortunate in having artifacts from the Voznesenskii collection brought to California for exhibit.
