Walk into a travel agency or pull up a map of California today, and the name Sebastopol conjures images of Sonoma County’s sprawling apple orchards, bohemian art markets, and liberal wine-country charm. Yet, rewind the clock to the Golden State’s infancy in the 1850s, and a traveler could have stumbled into five different frontier settlements...
The historical community has suffered a profound loss with the passing of James R. Gibson (1935–2026), Professor Emeritus at York University and one of the world’s foremost scholars of Russian America, Siberia, and the Russian Pacific. Gibson died at the age of 91, leaving behind an extraordinary body of scholarship that transformed the study of...