This kind of whiplash was enough to make a crisis of midlife: a deep-seated feeling of anxiety about the value of one’s achievements, the meaning of existence and the proximity of death.
On March 30, 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian envoy Baron Edouard de Stoeckl signed the Treaty of Cession. With a stroke of a pen, Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his ...