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Alaska is bought from Russia
Russian America was Russia's colony on the North American continent, run by a fur-trading company and inhabited by a few hundred Russians. Russia sold because the colony was indefensible against Britain and because the sea otter population was exhausted. Nobody asked the roughly 50,000 people living there, and the treaty distinguished between "civilised tribes" and others in a way that left title unresolved for over a century — settled only in 1971, when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gave land and capital to regional Native corporations rather than reservations.
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