ITT: facts you still can't wrap your head arround

>at one point Finns, Alaskans, and Persians were all countrymen

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>>1742412
>Never Again

>tfw people don't think of modern Russia as an empire because it's contiguous

>>1742448
>tfw people don't think of modern America as an empire because it's contiguous

What does it mean to "own" Alaska before the 20th century?

The people living there don't grow crops, have a barter economy and therefore can't and don't pay taxes.
You've got no neighbors to defend them from.
You don't have the technology to build significant, permanent structures there and, even if you could, they'd be of very limited utility.
So you can't even spend much time there to do anything other than say hello to the Eskimos and then go home.

>>1742453
also probably because the people they conquered had no writing and were almost completely wiped out and replaced by white Americans
so the different regions making up America aren't really characterized by the ethnicities or cultures of the people who were there previously

>>1742453
wat? Did you forget Alaska and Hawaii? and Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands, etc?

>>1742458
It means using the natives as slave labour for furs.

>>1742511
Russia has Kaliningrad in that case.

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Baltics used to be wealthy before Russians ruined it.

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A color photo from The Russian Empire, 1909.

Communists won't make color photos until the 1950's.

>>1742812
Not so much "communists" as people don't think color photography was a thing until after WW2.

>>1742412
That's a big country.

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>>1742458
nigga are you joking? Sitka was a permanent russian settlement since the beginning of the 19th century. There was legitimate industry happening there, and elsewhere in the Alaskan Peninsula.

Regular trade in the Aleutians had been carried out since the mid-18th century, and the Spaniards and Americans served as competition, even early on.

>At one point, modern day Europeans (Anglos, Germans, Scandis, French, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians) all lived in small tribes in Central Asia

>>1742812
That looks colorized, rather than in color.

>>1742863
UUUU

>>1742511
I would point more to the dozens of military bases the U.S has positioned all over the world.

>>1742458
Alaska was a legit colony, the Russians gave it to Britain's enemy because Britain had recently won a war against them and they feared they'd lose it to the British, giving them a base near Siberia.

>>1743087
Or northern Iran, Armenia, whatever you call that shore of the Black Sea.

File: Sheksna river, Korilov, 1909.jpg (257KB, 950x841px) Image search: [Google]

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>>1742812
>>1743142
These are actual color photos made by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, and he was a pioneer of color photography.
He used a three-color process (same photo taken through three separate RGB filters and superimposed to form the color photo) not colorization of an already taken black-and-white photo.

>>1742412
>America used to be great