Cartography, territory and empire mapping the Alaska boundary dispute, 1821-1903

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Author
Letzring, Michael
Chair
Ehrlander, Mary
Committee
Boylan, Brandon
Falk, Marvin
Maio, Christopher
Keyword
Boundaries
Maps
Alaska
Canada
Cartography
Alaska Boundary Tribunal
History
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URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11122/13086
Abstract
In the wake of the Klondike gold rush of 1898 a long-simmering dispute over the boundary between Alaska territory and British-America (Canada) rose to a boil. The disagreement between the United States and England was a combination of imperial arrogance, geographic ignorance, administrative neglect, and diplomatic brinksmanship. At every step the dispute was fueled by colonial cartography and served an eventual European/Euro-American hegemony over the indigenous Tlingit people. In this dissertation, a series of three papers will describe and analyze the precursors and resolution of the Alaska Boundary Dispute in part by employing novel methods of analysis of historical maps that the respective colonial powers used to establish their sovereign claims and then re-introduced as evidence in the 1903 tribunal. The research in this project examines the transformation and reordering of geographic knowledge through the employment of cartography of the Northwest Coast, but also reveals by deductive analysis of the same maps the underlying power struggle between colonial Europeans and Indigenous Americans. Colonial cartography contributed to a competition for imperial space on the Northwest Coast and the analysis of colonial mapping reveals a legacy of geography mediating history, maps creating territory, and the power of geographic knowledge.
Description
Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2022
Table of Contents
General introduction -- Forward -- Background -- Foundational literature -- Research questions -- Methods -- Structure. Chapter 1: An extravagant pretention, colonial cartography, geographic knowledge, and the Russian Ukase of 1821 -- I. Introduction, colonial claims and positions -- II. The Ukase of 1821 -- III. Diplomacy -- IV. The maps -- V. Middleton's memoir -- VI. The "provisional line" -- VII. Bibliography. Chapter 2: The earliest United States map of the Alaska Territory, sources, boundaries, and the wiles of William H. Seward -- I. Introduction -- II. The maps of 1867 -- III. Methods -- IV. Findings -- V. Discussion -- VI. Bibliography. Chapter 3: A splendid little tribunal, the role of cartography in the Alaska Boundary Tribunal of 1903 -- I. Introduction -- II. Background -- III. Literature and methods -- IV. The tribunal -- V. The argument of maps -- VI. Contemporary nineteenth-century disputes -- VII. Conclusion -- VIII. Bibliography. General conclusion -- I. Russian America -- II. Claims, boundaries and territory -- III. Geography and empires -- IV. Janus and the power of maps -- Bibliography to introduction and conclusion.
Date
2022-08
Type
Dissertation
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