Skip to main content

Fort Ross and the Russia-American Company

By


I want to say thank you for all this interest from Russia in our blog.  As a tip of the hat, I couldn't resist posting a little bit about Fort Ross in Northern California. This was apparently the most eastward expansion of the Russian-American Company, chartered by Tsar Paul I in the late 18th century.  The Spanish apparently got very worried and Father Junipero Serra established missions as far north as present-day San Franciso in an effort to stake out the domain of the Spanish empire.

This was just a few short years before Lewis and Clark's "Journey of Discovery," so apparently the fledgling United States was a bit worried too, although the extent of its landholdings at the time only extended as far as Montana with the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  But, the US already considered the West Coast a part of its Manifest Destiny and it would be only a matter of decades before California and the Oregon Territory were acquired in the wake of the Mexican War.

I often wonder what it would have been like if the European powers had been able to maintain a foothold in the American continent.  But, wars split Europe and made it relatively easy for the growing United States to conquer these far-flung territories.  Alex de Toqueville recognized both the growing power of the United States and that of Russia in the early 19th century.  The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, completing it's present day territorial size.

For the most part the relationship between the United States and Russia generally was good, but the negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War created some bitter feelings, largely over the disputed Sakhalin Island.  Hard to say how much of a role Teddy Roosevelt actually played in these negotiations other than to initially broker them, at Japan's request, but he was the first American president to win the Nobel Peace Prize as a result of the settlement.

Tsarist Russia was beginning to unravel at the time, and it wouldn't be long until the country was in deep turmoil.  The collapse of Russia and the creation of the Soviet Union led to competing political theories on foreign diplomacy between Wilson and Lenin, which Arno Mayer provided the first extensive history in 1959.

Open to suggestions for other books that have dealt with Russian-American relations over the years.  Please feel free to contribute.

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 16, 2014 at 4:58 PM

    I would suggest a children's book as a starter to understand the two cultures. The book is "The Cowboy and the Cossack". Sometimes fiction is closer to reality.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more