Lost Greenland

A synthesis of the history of American interest in Greenland, which to this date has never been carried out. Contrary to much contemporary reporting, the American interest in and desire to possess the vast Arctic island—26% larger than Alaska—is not a recent notion but in fact reaches back to before the United States was itself even a nation. While pieces of this history have often been told—and many have entered the American historical memory—the sweep of that history dates all the way to the anthropological fascinations of scientist, statesman, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin. From the 19th century Secretary of State who purchased Alaska to a president who wanted from Denmark not icy mountains but a submarine port in the Caribbean, to another American president emboldened by his vast powers in the aftermath of the Second World War to create Greenland as a NATO island, to 2025, when Greenland again emerged from its relative northern obscurity to dominate global news in ways unthinkable since the North Pole controversy of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary in 1909, the U.S. has been using the resources of Greenland and leaving behind tons of waste, abandoned airfields, and bewildered Greenlanders, most notably beginning when explorer Robert Peary began his removal of the Innaanganeq meteorite in 1894. This book is tightly focused on the chronology of nearly three centuries of American interest that now occupies the trans-Atlantic and circumpolar Arctic world once again with the second presidency of Donald Trump.