ALASKA
Reconstruction Vignette
| What will the government of this ice-covered desert cost? It was stated at the War Department yesterday that it would require a regiment of infantry. It costs $1,100 a year to maintain a single soldier in Washington. It would cost twice as much in Seward’s desert. It costs $1,000,000 a year to keep a man-of-war at sea. We should have to have at least six on the 3,000 miles of Seward’s coast, as naval men say here. We should have to institute a territorial government. What wouldn’t that cost? Indian wars would inevitably follow. They could not be avoided. On the Nebraska plains it now costs us $115,000 to kill one Indian. It would cost $300,000 a head to kill Seward’s Indians. There is not, in the history of diplomacy, such insensate folly as this treaty. |
During Reconstruction, the federal government increasingly channeled its resources and military power into western U.S. expansion and settler colonialism. On April 9, 1867, the New York Tribune published an editorial opposing the Alaska Purchase Treaty. The U.S. had agreed to purchase Alaska from the Russian Empire two weeks prior, at the direction of Secretary of State William H. Seward. Many Republican elites and industrialists saw acquisition of the Alaskan coastline as a means to expand the westward reach of U.S. sovereignty and capital, with new opportunities for whaling and growing trade in Asia. The author of this article vehemently opposed this purchase, but did not take umbrage with the cruel practices of settler colonialism and Native displacement. Rather, as excerpted here, he was concerned with the possible economic cost of genocide. Opponents of this acquisition often called it “Seward’s Folly,” believing that the federal government had made an economic blunder and acquired resource-poor land. These criticisms would abate in the 1890s, with the discovery of gold in Yukon.
Source: Chronicling America
Alaska
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Nonexistent
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 0 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in Alaska’s standards is nonexistent. The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development adopted the current history standards in 2016.
In Alaska, history standards are cumulative and not divided by grade level. They emphasize historical inquiry and “reflect the cumulative knowledge a student must demonstrate in order to fulfill the Alaska history graduation requirement.” Not all standards are written this way. Math, science, and ELA standards are written by grade level and include learning targets per grade. The history curriculum focuses almost exclusively on Alaskan history. Reconstruction would fall in the section titled “Colonial Era: The United States Period (1867–1912),” but is not mentioned specifically. One positive of this approach is that the standards leave room for revisionist approaches to history, emphasizing that students should “know that the interpretation of history may change as new evidence is discovered.”
Because Alaska’s standards provide so little information about whether and how districts and schools should teach Reconstruction, we chose to investigate curricula at the district level. The Local Snapshot below is not meant as a judgment of these districts’ approach to Reconstruction. They were chosen largely at random and are not factored into the grade the state standards receive. The brief analysis of district-level curricula that follows is intended simply to provide a snapshot into how state standards, or lack thereof, can shape Reconstruction pedagogy in the classroom.
Local Snapshot
Fairbanks North Star Borough School District
Grade 8
The Early U.S. History course in grade 8 concludes with a unit on “The Civil War, 1850–1865” that requires students to “describe the ways in which the federal government prepared to reunite the nation after the Civil War.” A suggested activity calls for students to “write their own reconstruction plan.”
Grade 10/11
A one-semester course on “Recent U.S. History” covering Reconstruction to the 1930s is taught in either grade 10 or 11. Problems include describing “the backlash to Reconstruction” without mentioning white supremacy, emphasizing Lincoln’s “moderate approach” to “healing the nation,” and describing the “Compromise Election of 1867,” which seems to be a reference to the Compromise of 1877.
More positively, the content objectives require students to learn about the Reconstruction Amendments and their consequences on “freedman, indigenous peoples, and immigrants” and the goals and successes of the Freedmen’s Bureau. They also “identify African American leaders who helped rebuild state governments and society during Reconstruction” and “Trace the political power of freedman (sic) in state legislatures and in Congress through the Reconstruction era.” The final content objective — “Identify the different ways states defined citizenship and race, and evaluate the impact these laws had on the economic and political rights of marginalized groups” — is a strong jumping-off point for discussions of the fractured legacy of Reconstruction.
The largest school district in the state, Anchorage provides few curricular details online. Notably, the U.S. history courses taught in grades 5, 6, 8, and 11 nearly all seem to avoid the Reconstruction era. Grade 5 runs from colonization “through the Civil War,” while grade 6 begins with the 20th century. Grade 8 concludes with “Expansion and Reform (1860s).” Grade 11 technically covers the Reconstruction era as part of an expansive survey that seeks to teach students all of U.S. history through the Great Depression during one semester. The district website includes a link to the UCLA National Standards for History in the Schools which contain a “Civil War and Reconstruction” unit, but it is unclear whether or how the district integrates those standards into its curriculum.
Educator Experiences
Joanna Wassillie, a middle and high school teacher in White Mountain, explained in our survey that when it comes to Reconstruction, teachers generally lack “knowledge in the subject area” and are unaware of the resources available. Wassillie sought out webinars and outside resources including Teachinghistory.org to learn more about how to teach Reconstruction.
Assessment
Alaska’s use of cumulative standards for history content means that the Department of Education provides no specific statewide guidance on how to teach Reconstruction. District approaches vary, but even generally robust curricula contain incomplete and incorrect information that emphasize national politics over Black activism.
The cumulative state standards allow districts to choose how deeply to delve into Reconstruction. Our cursory analysis of Alaska district curricula in Fairbanks and Anchorage demonstrates the widely varying coverage of the subject throughout the state. While districts and individual educators can and do use outside resources to extend their instruction, the lack of an institutional commitment to studying Reconstruction limits the scope of these efforts and ensures that students will not learn about Reconstruction in a systematic way.
Without guidance around key Reconstruction-era history, many students will not learn about the intensification of white supremacy, the Black Codes, the KKK, debates over who would control land and labor, and Black agency and political organizing. Teaching Reconstruction effectively requires centering Black people’s struggles to redefine freedom and equality and gain control of their own land and labor during and after the Civil War. Any discussion of Reconstruction must also grapple with the role of white supremacist terrorism in the defeat of Reconstruction and the negative and positive legacies of the era that persist to this day.
In 2022, Republican lawmakers introduced four bills that would, all together, ban teaching about racism or sexism, political advocacy, or the 1619 Project, and require curriculum to promote “individual freedom.” All of these bills died in committee. Although these bills did not pass, their introduction is still troubling. Several respondents to our survey expressed concern about the possible chilling effects on classroom education that such bills can have, particularly on discussions of the history and legacies of Reconstruction.