Alaska

The biggest state, and the emptiest

Alaska covers 665,384 square miles, more than a sixth of the whole United States and two and a half times the size of Texas. Its shoreline, measured by NOAA around every bay and island, runs 33,904 miles, more than a third of the national total. Yet only about 737,000 people lived there in 2025, which makes Alaska 48th in population and last in density, with roughly one person for every square mile of land.

Most Alaskans live in a small part of the state. Anchorage alone is home to almost 290,000 people, nearly two in five Alaskans. Juneau and Fairbanks, with about 31,000 people each, are a distant second and third.

From Russian America to the 49th state

For most of the 1800s Alaska was a Russian colony, run by a fur-trading company from New Archangel, today’s Sitka. The United States bought it in 1867, and the transfer ceremony took place in Sitka that October. For decades afterward Alaska was governed loosely, first as a military district and then as the District of Alaska, and it became a territory only in 1912.

The push for statehood grew after World War II, which brought military bases, new roads and thousands of new residents to Alaska. Congress passed the Alaska Statehood Act, which President Eisenhower signed on July 7, 1958. Alaskans voted to accept its terms, and on January 3, 1959, Eisenhower’s proclamation made Alaska the 49th state. A new 49-star flag was unfurled that same day.

The name

The name comes from the Unangan, or Aleut, people of the Aleutian Islands. Their word for the Alaska Peninsula, Alaxsxa, means “the mainland,” as opposed to the islands. Russian traders adopted it as “Alyaska,” and over time the name spread from the peninsula to the whole territory. The often-repeated translation “the Great Land” is, according to the City of Unalaska, a mistake.

A capital you cannot drive to

Juneau has been the capital since 1906, when the government’s records were shipped there from Sitka on a mail boat. It sits on the mainland in Southeast Alaska, hemmed in by mountains and icefields, and no road connects it to the rest of North America: people arrive by plane or by ferry. Alaskans voted in 1974 to move the capital to a site on the road system, but the move was never paid for, and later attempts failed. The capital page tells the full story.

A flag designed by a 13-year-old

Alaska’s flag was designed by a child. In 1927 Benny Benson, a 13-year-old seventh grader at a mission school near Seward, won a territory-wide contest with eight gold stars on a blue field: the Big Dipper, pointing to the North Star. The legislature adopted it that year, and the law still names him as its designer. The flag page has the story.

Alaska has no official nickname. “The Last Frontier,” the most common, comes from the closing line of the state song, which calls the flag “the simple flag of a last frontier.” The official motto, adopted in 1967, is “North to the Future.”

Symbols of the north

Most of Alaska’s 20 official symbols come straight from its landscape. The forget-me-not became the territorial flower in 1917, the willow ptarmigan, an Arctic grouse that turns white in winter, was picked by schoolchildren in 1955, and the Sitka spruce, king salmon, moose and bowhead whale followed. Dog mushing is the state sport, the Alaskan Malamute the state dog, and the woolly mammoth the state fossil. Schoolchildren chose the state insect too: the four-spot skimmer dragonfly, which beat the mosquito in a statewide vote.

Alaska also recognizes 23 Alaska Native languages as official languages alongside English, from Inupiaq in the far north to Tsimshian in the southeast. See every symbol, with the law behind it, on the Alaska symbols page.

Borders

Alaska borders no other state. It shares a long land border with Canada’s Yukon and British Columbia, and its coasts face the Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. At the Bering Strait, Alaska’s mainland lies about 55 miles from Russia.