Alaska's militarized landscape: The unwritten legacy of the Cold War

This dissertation studies the impress of Cold War military investment on Alaska's cultural landscape. From 1946 through 1989, Alaska served as the United States' Cold War sentinel and the air defense shield against the threat of Soviet attack over the North Pole. During the Cold War the US military was a dominant force in the state economy and by the end of the period had built approximately 435 military facilities and installations in Alaska, ranging in size from those contained in individual, isolated buildings to massive, self-contained cities.; This investment has had different types and degrees of impacts on different places. The study explores these patterns with respect primarily to the facilities' temporal longevity, physical size, environmental site, and geographical situation, but also considers the values placed on the installations in contemporary Alaska. The research involved archival study of primary and secondary records documenting the sites held by a variety of military and civilian agencies as well as field documentation of the current condition of a sample of the sites.; As an exploratory study in American landscape history, the research indicates the importance of the military investment for creating a scaffolding for the growth of Alaska's cultural landscape. It is an example, derived from contemporary cultural geography, that focuses on the roles of culturally dominant and economically hegemonic agents in landscape formation. Though pervasive, the military influence is not always readily apparent today because many facilities have been removed, altered, or recontextualized. This project is a first step in bringing study of the Cold War into the mainstream of research of cultural and historical geography; expanding the boundaries of traditional military geography to include the impact of the military on material culture and cultural landscapes; and extending the research of the historical geography of Alaska.