Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Happy Seward's Folly Day

All right, so they didn't call it Seward's Folly Day, but from American Memory's Today in History page:

...On March 30, 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward agreed to purchase Alaska for seven million dollars. Critics attacked Seward for the secrecy surrounding the deal with Russia, which came to be known as "Seward's folly." They mocked his willingness to spend so much on "Seward's icebox" and Andrew Johnson's "polar bear garden."...

For more from the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, go to "American Memory" in my links list.

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