The third book in my Aunt Phil's Trunk Alaska history series, which first debuted in 2008, features entertaining stories from Alaska's colorful past during the years 1912 to 1935.

Trains, planes and automobiles arrive and forever change the lives of Alaskans throughout these pages. Hardy souls with hammers and drills, axes and mattocks, mauls and gauges found it took muscle and endurance to lay railroad tracks in Alaska’s untamed wilderness.

Other adventurers brought automobiles and airplanes north that transformed the way we mined resources, explored the country and traveled the Great Land. Stories include the birth of Anchorage in 1915, Balto’s famous serum run to Nome in 1926 and the fatal plane crash of aviator Wiley Post and humorist Will Rogers near Barrow in 1935.

Readers from 9 to 99 also will follow pioneering farmers who left their homes in several northern states to carve out an agricultural community in the fertile Matanusaka Valley in the mid-1930s. This volume of short stories and hundreds of historical photographs is sure to keep readers turning pages to see what happens next!

Learn more by watching this video https://youtu.be/zKuI-Nty1T8

This volume is also available in ebook format for $9.99 at https://auntphilstrunk.com/product/aunt-phils-trunk-vol-3-ebook/ or in audiobook format at https://adbl.co/32ALmos

About the Author
My Dad’s older sister, Phyllis Downing Carlson, was one of Alaska's most respected historians. She willed me a strange inheritance after she died in 1993: her entire life’s work of research into the extraordinary history of my great state. The trunk contained her notes, research and rare Alaska history books that she had collected during her 84 years in the Last Frontier.

I felt a deep responsibility to do something with this gift. So I returned to college (in my 50s) and graduated with a degree in journalism and a minor in history from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2003.

Then I sorted through Aunt Phil’s notes, organized her work into periods of time and began researching on my own to fill in some holes for pieces of history that I thought important. Once the research was complete, I wrote short stories about the events, people and places that helped make Alaska what it is today and searched for hundreds of historical photographs to complement the storytelling.

The result of my labors became the five-book Aunt Phil’s Trunk Alaska history series, which earned the 2016 gold medal for Best Nonfiction Series from Literary Classics International. Each book features a different period of time in Alaska’s colorful past.

I also developed a full curriculum with student workbooks and teacher guides for classroom and home-school use, which won a silver medal in the Education Category from Literary Classics International in 2018. (A college book took gold.)