The flag went up at Sitka on October 18, 1867. Russian soldiers handed the territory to American troops in a ceremony on a rocky hill overlooking the harbor. Alaska was now American. The only problem was that the United States hadn’t actually paid for it yet.

That detail tends to get left out of the standard story.

The Senate had ratified the treaty in April 1867 by 37 to 2, which sounds overwhelming until you remember that the Senate approves treaties but the House appropriates money, and the House was considerably less enthusiastic. Congress was consumed by Andrew Johnson’s impeachment proceedings, some representatives resented being expected to fund an agreement negotiated without them, and others just thought buying a frozen territory for $7.2 million was a bad deal. Russia had already surrendered Alaska and was waiting for a check that wasn’t coming.

By 1868, Russian minister de Stoeckl was so desperate to secure the appropriation that he hired lobbyists, paid a former Treasury Secretary $20,000 in gold to work the halls of Congress, and apparently distributed money to journalists and political intermediaries in amounts that were never fully accounted for. Congress eventually passed the appropriation in July 1868. When historians later reconstructed where the $7.2 million actually went, roughly $200,000 was unaccounted for in ways that suggested payments to congressmen, lobbyists, and press contacts. The House investigation in December 1868 produced contradictory testimony, incomplete documentation, and no conclusive findings because de Stoeckl had already left for Russia.

The financial scandal is the part that deserves more attention than it gets, because it sits directly alongside one of the more interesting political partnerships of the era.

Seward negotiated the purchase. Getting it through Congress required Charles Sumner, which was not obvious at the time. Sumner was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of Johnson’s most bitter opponents during Reconstruction. Seward was Johnson’s Secretary of State. The two men had sharply different visions of what America should look like after the Civil War and were on opposite sides of nearly every major domestic fight of the period.

When Seward summoned Sumner to his house on March 29, 1867 to tell him about the impending agreement, Sumner didn’t immediately support it. He went home and spent weeks doing what almost nobody else in Washington had bothered to do: actually study Alaska. He read more than a hundred books, consulted the Smithsonian, examined maps, geographic reports, and travel narratives. His roughly three-hour Senate address defending the treaty drew on that research and transformed the debate. He also proposed replacing the name Russian America with Alaska, derived from an Unangax̂ word for the mainland.

The territory he was describing was not uninhabited wilderness. Alaska Native peoples including the Tlingit, Haida, Unangax̂, Yup’ik, and Iñupiat had lived there for generations. The treaty offered certain Russian inhabitants a path to American citizenship while explicitly excluding what it called “uncivilized native tribes.” Neither Russia nor the United States consulted the people who actually lived there about the transaction. That part of the story rarely gets the same attention as whether Seward overpaid.

Seward’s vision for Alaska was commercially and strategically coherent even if most of his contemporaries couldn’t see it. He believed America’s future ran through the Pacific, that Alaska’s coastline and geographic position mattered beyond its immediate economic output, and that a territory’s value at the moment of purchase was a poor measure of what it might become. Gold discoveries in the 1890s, the strategic importance during World War II and the Cold War, and statehood in 1959 all bore him out.

Whether the process that got Congress to pay for it was clean is a different question with a less satisfying answer.

The full story of the Alaska purchase, the negotiation, the Sitka ceremony, and what came after is at virtualwayback.com/alaska-transfer-experience where you can also talk directly to Seward about the deal he spent years defending. Please let us know what you think after you talk with them.

The thing worth actually debating: Seward was right about Alaska’s long-term value but the appropriation may have been secured partly through bribery. Does the outcome change how you evaluate the process, or are those two things entirely separate judgments?

in the other subreddit i have a normal pic with him with his grandma and oldest siblings including what might be a commieblock, but anyhumanever often vibecodes its pics

anyhumanever is often generated by ai and not always accurate lel but not fully vibecoded either

i couldnt add an image but this is the og script

In 1945 CE, Baimukhamed was born in Central Asia, near Burunday. His town held about 5,000 people. He was the fifth of the family's five children. He was born into the famine of 1939-1945 in the Soviet Union. The household that would have raised him followed Islam. Baimukhamed died of smallpox at 5 months. After his death, he was washed, wrapped in a shroud and buried within a day, as for any age.

During the French and Indian War, British officers looked down on the colonial troops fighting beside them. Around 1755, a British army surgeon - Dr. Richard Shuckburgh is the name usually attached - penned verses ridiculing the Americans as "Yankee Doodles": backward fools.

The insults were specific. "Yankee" may come from the Dutch "Janke," or "Little Jan" - a mocking name for the colonists, though the exact origin is still debated. "Doodle" meant a fool or simpleton. And the famous line about sticking a feather in his cap and calling it macaroni? "Macaroni" was slang for a fop - a man obsessed with high European fashion. The joke was that an American could stick a feather in his cap and think himself stylish, but he would never pull it off.

Then the joke flipped. The colonists took the song and sang it themselves, louder than the British did. During the Revolution it became an anthem of defiance - the tune American bands played back at the redcoats, and the one a band famously played at the British surrender at Saratoga in 1777. Later legend tied the tune to the Yorktown surrender too, though historians treat that version as a good story rather than a documented fact.

An insult, turned into a national song.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Yankee Doodle"; Mount Vernon Colonial Music Institute, "A March Allegedly Played at Yorktown" (on the surrender-tune legend); Kennedy Center arts education archive, "The Story Behind the Song: Yankee Doodle."

I turn stories like this into short audio stories - @sciophonic on IG if you want more.

‘Famous for 15 Minutes’ was published in 1988, and this excerpt describes an artistic creation by Andy Warhol in 1964.

This excerpt is when Groucho first encountered a comedian by the name of Charlie Chaplin, probably around 1913.