Sam Leith Sam Leith

Glorious Misadventures, by Owen Mathews – review

The brutality and folly of Russia’s bid to conquer America has the makings of grand tragicomedy says <em>Sam Leith </em>

ITAR-Tass news agency 
issue 03 August 2013

So: Russia’s imperial possessions on the Pacific North West of America. Remember those? No. Me neither. Something vague about the Russians flogging a bit of Alaska to the United States in the middle of the 19th century perhaps. But until I’d read this book I didn’t know that at one point

Continental Russian America, not counting the Aleutian Islands, stretched 1,400 miles from its Eastern Tip (today called Cape Prince of Wales, by little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait) to its southwestern boundary near Sitka.

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