Seward's Folly: How the US Bought Alaska From Russia for $7.2M in 1867

On March 30, 1867, at four in the morning in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of State William Seward signed a treaty with the Russian Empire to purchase Alaska — more than half a million square miles of land, larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined — for $7.2 million, roughly two cents an acre. American newspapers mocked the deal as "Seward's Folly" and called Alaska "Seward's Icebox," convinced the U.S. had wasted public money on a frozen wasteland nobody wanted. Seward believed history would prove him right, even though he would not live to see it. This video tells the true story of the Alaska Purchase of 1867: the late-night signing between American and Russian negotiators, the public ridicule that followed, and how a territory dismissed as worthless snow and ice turned out to hold some of the richest ground on the North American continent — from the 1912 Novarupta eruption, the most powerful volcanic blast of the twentieth century, to the resources and land Alaska concealed for decades after the purchase. We also examine the Indigenous peoples of Alaska who lived on this land long before Russia claimed it and who were never consulted when Russia sold it to the United States. Discover why a purchase ridiculed for a century as America's biggest blunder became one of the most valuable land deals in U.S. history, and why it took Washington so long to recognize what was already there. Perfect for viewers interested in American history, U.S. expansion, William Seward, the Russian Empire, 19th-century diplomacy, and the hidden story behind Alaska statehood.