There is a petition circulating that seeks to turn over the state of Alaska back to Russian control. The “Alaska Back to Russia” petition has reportedly gotten nearly 30 thousand signatures.
Alaska was purchased from Russia as a US territory in 1867 by then Secretary of State William Seward for 7 point 2 million dollars, and it was officially declared the 49th state on January 3rd 1959.
The US Supreme Court ruled unilateral secession to be unconstitutional after the Civil War. But the government usually issues an official response to petitions that get one hundred thousand signatures in a month, which gives the Alaska Back to Russia petition until April 20th to get that many signatures.
The wording of the petition doesn’t mention the procedure to actually secede, but rather a history of Alaska and who had lived there in the past.
Part of it reads: “Groups Siberian Russians crossed the Isthmus (now the Bering Strait) 16-10 thousand years ago. Russian began to settle on the Arctic coast, Aleuts inhabited the Aleutian Archipelago.”
There was a similar petition circulating in 2012 that demanded the secession of Texas from the rest of the US, and although it got the one hundred thousand signatures, the government refused to pass it into law.
SOURCE: GeoBeats News YouTube
http://youtu.be/G8FSOMDVqJo
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