Exploration of Alaska

Russian explores made a mighty drive to the East in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Despite the absolutely abominable conditions, they covered Siberia and the far east very quickly, and it seems that by the end of the reign of Ivan the terrible (1547-1584) they had crossed the whole of the Asian mainland and reached not only Chukotka and Kamchatka, but also the coast of North America.

At the beginning of the 18^th century, a number of Russian expeditions explored Alaska, but its discovery is usually linked with the year 1741 and the name of A. Chirkov . then, until the end of the century, there were more than 80 expeditions by explorers, merchants and hunters. Russian merchant G. Shelikhov founded the first Russian settlement on Kodiak island in 1798. Then the Russian-American Co was set up, and the control of all the hunting and mining on the northwestern coast of America up to the Bering Strait was handed over to it. Novo-Arkhangelsk (now Sitka) became the center of Alaska.

Russian possessions in Alaska led to several conflicts with Great Britain and the USA, and, in 1853-1856, when Russia was engaged in the Crimean war against a coalition of great Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia for control of the Middle East, the tsarist government lacked the necessary forces on the Pacific Ocean to defend Russian settlements on the American continent. It decided, therefore, to sell Alaska. Of its two major rivals Russia gave preference to the USA, counting on the latter`s support in the international arena, and in 1867, Alaska was sold to the USA for 7,2 million dollars.

Negro Slavery in America

Negro slavery had been introduced into the American colonies in 1619 when the Dutch ship brought its cargo of human chattels to Virginia. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the plantation system came to be an integral part of the Southern economy, slavery as the source of plantation labour seemed more and more identified with the South`s economic well-being.

There were numbers of Americans, however, who didn`t support the slave-holders` rationalizations. Many of them joined the numerous Northern societies dedicated to the abolition of slavery.

Abraham Lincoln`s election in 18860 was followed by secession the formation of a Southern Confederacy, and ultimately by Civil War.

Six weeks after Lincoln`s inauguration Southern batteries fired on Fort Summer, and the war came.

During the bitter years of sectional conflicts that proceeded secession and war, Southern agrarians had steadfastly opposed Northern industrialists. On April 9, 1865, in the town of Appomattox, Court House in Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered his armies – and the southern policy - to general Ulysses S. grant. The war was over; the union was preserved.

On April 14, 1865, when A. Lincoln was struck down by an assassin`s bullet, radical republicans exclaimed that it was “ God`s will ”.

The Ku Klux Klan and other instruments designed by the Southern whites to terrorize Negroes expressed far more than a simple reaction to political corruption. In adopting their violently oppressive tactics Southern whites were indicating their basic hostility to any free and equal participation in the political progress by the Negroes whom they so recently, and so unwillingly, emancipated.