Mt. Redoubt in History

With all the recent coverage of the Mt. Redoubt Volcano in Alaska, I thought it would be fun to list some reports and dissertations that have been produced about Mt. Redoubt over the years.  Some of these publications can be read online and all of them should be available to your through Interlibrary Loan at [...]

Book Review: Alaska USA

This week I finished the book:
Hilscher, Herb, and Miriam Hilscher. 1959. Alaska, U.S.A. Boston: Little, Brown.
This book was written at the dawn of Alaska Statehood. Herb Hilscher was a delegate to Alaska’s Constitutional Convention in the winter of 1955-56. Mr. Hilscher was concerned at the number of people in the lower 48 states who were [...]

Finding background on Emmonak and other communities

With the villiages of Emmonak and Kotlik in the Alaskan press, I thought it would be helpful to list some resources you can use to find basic background information on Alaska communities. All of the resources I talk about in this blog entry can be found at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Alaska, which is one page out of a [...]

Obama 1 Patriotism 1

Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence has these words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
All men (human beings). Unalienable Rights. Endowed by the Creator. This can [...]

New Feature: Alaska Library News

If you visit my site even once in a while, you noticed that after then-Senator Obama won the Democratic nomination, the upper right hand side of the page was given over to Obama campaign news. Once he became President-Elect, it became Presidential Transition News.
Now that he is President, I’ve decided to de-politicize that portion of [...]

My National Day of Service in Juneau

As I think most people in this country knew, President-Elect Obama asked people to make Martin Luther King day, “A day on, not a day off.” I was one of many people who answered the call. I went to the national day of service site and registered for a local event.
My spouse had other plans [...]

What can you do with AK BASIS?

If you want to follow state legislation in Alaska, you’ll need to make BASIS your friend. As I mentioned in a previous post, BASIS is a searchable database of bills before the current legislature. But there is much more than that at the BASIS home page of http://www.legis.state.ak.us/basis/start.asp. For starters, you can research bills online [...]

Alaskans, Follow Your Legislature

On Tuesday, January 20th, the 26th Session of the Alaska State Legislature will get underway. If you’d like to follow the activities of your legislature, then bookmark http://www.legis.state.ak.us/, the official site of the Legislature. Here you will find a number of helpful features including:

Toll-free numbers (within Alaska) for your legislators
Live audio and video feeds [...]

Dept of Peace? No Thanks

The transition site change.gov is currently collecting citizen ideas through it’s Citizen Briefing Book at http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/.  If you do a search on the phrase “Department of Peace”, you’ll find a lot of ideas suggesting establishing a Department of Peace. Most of these are likely modeled on Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s idea and they seem to have [...]

Coming Soon: From Whether to How

A week from today, Barack Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States. Of all the hopes that I have for President Obama, the one that I think will be the best for the country is moving us from “Whether” to “How.”
For at least the past 16 years, but especially the last 8, our [...]