Talk:Alaska Purchase

Equivalent of purchase amount

The lead states "a sum of $7.2 million in 1867 (equivalent to $22.5 billion in 2023)", while the description under the first photo states "US$7.2 million check used to pay for Alaska (equivalent to $129 million in 2023)". So, which is correct? 92.109.99.223 (talk) 20:06, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I have unified the article to $129M using our {{inflation}} template. Note the ref after the equivalent specifies that GDP deflator is being used. $22.5 billion appears to come from nominal GDP. I suppose both could be argued for, but I have gone with the referenced value and the standard Wikipedia template. Thanks for spotting the discrepancy. Commander Keane (talk) 22:32, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

My first contribution to Wiki :) 92.109.99.223 (talk) 20:19, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

It was a rather big contribution actually. Before I made the fix a Google search for how much is the alaska purchase worth today shouted $22.5 Billion at me, now the first result is is $129M. I think Google turned off their AI search (the shouter) since then. Commander Keane (talk) 22:46, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Where is the document?

We have an entire WP article based on a document - the Alaska purchase agreement - but no copy of the document. Surely it exists on the internet somewhere? 14.2.207.148 (talk) 20:40, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a webhost. We don't keep the documents on here. You can find a link to it in the External Links section of the article. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 21:35, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

What do you mean "We don't keep the documents on here" - every major treaty signed over the past 200 years that meet WP:NOTABILITY and WP:VERIFY has a copy on Wikipedia. Plus if there was a copy under External Links, that would be hosting a copy, would it not? And no, there is not a copy under external links - I do not refer to a copy of a check for payment, nor a vote in congress that a treaty should be signed, but an actual copy of the purchase agreement/treaty itself. As this treaty was co-signed by the US, there must be a copy of one in English somewhere.

This article has been around since 2003, is of interest to several WikiProjects, yet still has a quality rating of only C: "The article is substantial but is still missing important content." It certainly is. 14.2.207.148 (talk) 01:11, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

Russian nationalists say that the bullion for the "check" (we spell that word "cheque" here in Canada) went down in a storm on the Gulf of Finland before it reached St. Petersburg. To them, Alaska was never paid for and they want it back. Putin's propaganda has been hyping the "Alaska is OURS" notion on Russian TV and on giant billboards all over the country for a long time. Next week's Putin-Alaska summit in Alaska (which the addled US president seems to think is part of Russia, so-influenced he is by Putin's conversations with him...) is a dangerous time, as both have been talking about exchanges of territory. The US is not a member of the World Court, so its warrant for Putin's arrest does not apply on US soil. What Putin is going to try to pull, and which high-security location it will be, we'll see on Friday...

We here in BC who are awake are a bit (a lot) terrified by what this meeting will bring about. If Trump wants to show him where Grand-dad's hotel at Bennett Lake City is (Bennett, British Columbia) and they were to step over the border, I hope our Prime Minister Carney has the balls to arrest Putin if he's an inch inside Canada. And we let your felon-president into our country once at Kananaskis, Alberta where he had to run from to escape having to face Zelenskyy, Modi and others; diplomatic immunity of a sort must have applied as to why my country admitted a known and convicted felon, but if he's arrogant enough to think he can violate Canadian sovereignty again, in the company of the world's most vicious war criminal, he's got another thing coming.

I note that the Alaska boundary dispute article is not mentioned or linked in this article, so have to wonder why that is. What I do see is the quadruple-footnoted statement that the Purchase was intended to lead to y'all acquiring BC...as it was natural. Ahem....we're still here, and so far un-annexed.

BC's position on the Purchase

I won't go into BC's experience of the annexation of our claims on SE Alaska in 1867 or the putsch-by-mob invasion of the Yukon Ports (i.e. those at the head of the Lynn Canal)in 1898, but the truth that none of your national myth-fabrication is true: Britain had been offered Alaska before it was offered to Seward, and Alexander II wasn't broke nor did he hold a grudge against Britain for his loss of the Crimean War, 13 years before - a very long time in the diplomatic chess-game that was the Great Game. Britain, as so often in the history of the Pacific Northwest, was distracted by affairs in Europe, India, Africa and elsewhere, and it would seem didn't want to face a war, which mostly would have been fought in the Atlantic and in Canada (then only meaning east of the Great Lakes) - and manning ane occupying by troops and Royal Navy ships of the whole of Russian America was likely to daunting a prospect when they were also dealing with events like the Paris Commune, the rise of Prussia, the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion and also the Taiping Rebellion in China.. I think the troubles at Khartoum may have fit in there somewhere also.

So Britain snoozed and didn't jump on the offer of Russian America, despite our retired Gov. Douglas' loud protests to London - he'd already tried to get the combined fleets of the Royal Navy and French fleet to seize Sikta when they were in Victoria in retreat from their failed siege of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Kamchatka (Petropavlovsk Kamchatskiy during the Crimean War.

I dropped by the Clarence Strait and Alexander Archipelago pages to check into Alexander Begg's reasons for his analysis of the 1825 treaty and 1839 Anglo-Russian Convention (in Wikipedia as the RAC-HBC Agreement) to check on his conclusions concerning the "Duke of Portland's Channel" and the route described from Point A northwards but the linked work is now a dead link. I'd found the ones I'd used to bring BC's side - BCPOV - into the article many years ago, which I'd found on a now-defunct site called "Our Roots" (nosracines.ca) - which is now hosted by the U.Calgary library, but hard to search now...

I can't - and won't - work on Wikipedia articles anymore, other than comments on talkpages, and talkpages aren't supposed to be blog-ish but this week's coming summit is a special circumstance, and I reserve the human right to make my thoughts and objections known. Wikipedia isn't supposed to have rules, remember?

An open letter to Alaskans from a friendly British Columbian is where my "ranting" can be found now, though my range of topics in coming articles is far beyond BC-Alaskan history.

My usual monicker of Skookum1 was already taken by some other Substack user when I was setting up my account yesterday, so I adapted it to Skookum70 ...as I'm turning 70 years old this fall... there's a possible error on that article about Begg's rationale about why our mutual boundary is supposed to follow the Clarence Strait and exit the archipelago via the Icy Strait, but I'll have to take out what I'd remembered until I can find Begg's works s somewhere if not at U.Calgary, and quote him directly.

As I say in that article, if you feel inspired to wave a sea of Ukrainian, Canadian - and BC's and Greenland's and Denmark's flags to greet the world's two most notorious criminal dictators (well, Netanyahu qualifies, too), the Flag shoppe in vancouver BC or its equivalent in Seattle will surely be able to ship them in time. Amazon could too, of course, but i'd rather not give Jeff Bezos the business.

As friends of mine told me when I was being harassed and then blocked - without an ANI - by uppity admins to help with an aggressive invasion of BC history by a teenage Texan over ten years ago - "write for yourself, Mike, and they'll have to cite you" makes sense to me now, but years of life kept me busy; karma caught up with me so I'm now ensconced in my wheelchair with a SmartTV, Youtube, and a keyboard where I can write out my knowledge without being harassed by know-nothings and wiki-trolls... my mind is free even if my body isn't. 2604:3D08:5776:7900:C1E3:F947:F3B6:473D (talk) 21:33, 12 August 2025 (UTC)