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Alaska, the self-stylized “last frontier” of the USA, did not put a lot of emphasis on issues of quality of life during its early colonial years. When Russians showed up first in the eighteenth century, the expansion was fueled by the quest for fur-bearing sea mammals in Alaskan waters. When the USA purchased Russian America in 1867, “Seward’s Icebox” seemed of little economic interest to the new owners. This changed dramatically with the various gold rushes of the late nineteenth century, which set in motion cycles of economic boom and bust based on unsustainable exploitation of natural (and mostly nonrenewable) resources (Naske and Slotnick 1987). It seems as if most of the immigrants who made it north considered life in Alaska as a cold nightmare, made somewhat tolerable by the prospect of striking it rich (and moving south).
World War II changed the face of Alaska...
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Schweitzer, P.P. (2022). Alaska, Living Conditions of the Inupiat. In: Maggino, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_67-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_67-2
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