The front page of the Alaska Empire leads with a prison uprising at Folsom—2,000 convicts in open revolt—while also tracking major national and international stories of November 25, 1927. President Coolidge hosted famous aviators including Charles Lindbergh and Ruth Elder at a luncheon to present Lindbergh with the Hubbard medal, cementing the 'Lindy' craze that had gripped America since his transatlantic flight just months earlier. Internationally, Romania's Premier Ionel Bratianu died after complications from throat surgery, marking another royal blow to the Balkans following King Ferdinand's death just four months prior. Meanwhile, a new fathometer invention promises to revolutionize maritime navigation by using sound echoes to measure ocean depth—a practical marvel that Director H. Lester Jones of the Coast and Geodetic Survey announced would save lives in fog and darkness. The paper also tracks the 1928 presidential race: Southern Democrats reportedly plot to nominate the wet, Catholic Al Smith just to watch him lose the general election, as a cautionary tale to the rest of the country.

This snapshot captures America in late 1927, caught between modernization and old anxieties. Lindbergh's celebrity represented unbounded optimism about technology and youth, while the Folsom uprising and talk of Smith's candidacy exposed deeper fault lines: Prohibition remained bitterly divisive, religious prejudice against Catholics was mainstream political currency, and regional tensions within the Democratic party threatened coherence. The fathometer exemplifies how 1920s America was simultaneously harnessing science—radios, aviation, sonar—to remake everyday life. Alaska itself was still a frontier territory, not yet statehood, and the Empire's reporting on Coast Guard surveys and salmon disputes shows how federal modernization was creeping into even remote reaches. Within a year, the 1928 election would pit Smith against Herbert Hoover, and the stock market crash would shatter the prosperity this page takes for granted.

• A coroner's jury in Hastings, Colorado found that two strikers killed in the Columbine Mine fracas died from bullets by 'unknown persons'—and rendered the deaths 'not felonious.' This 1920s judicial sleight of hand effectively whitewashed a labor violence incident.
• The French military was considering bringing back the old red pantaloons of infantry uniforms, inspired by the colorful uniforms displayed in an American Legion parade in Paris. A wartime relic was nearly resurrected due to aesthetic envy.
• A new Atlantic-crossing airship design (U-100) was expected to cost $2,100,000 and cross the ocean in just 18 hours—yet it would carry only 30 tons of fuel and six Rolls-Royce engines. This was cutting-edge fantasy that would never materialize.
• Silver fox fur at a Seattle auction averaged $112 per pelt, while wolf averaged $10.27—yet the best wolf pelts sold at $11.25. The fur trade was booming enough to warrant wholesale monthly auctions tracking price movements like a stock exchange.
• A well-preserved copy of Fitzgerald's 1869 'Rubaiyat' was worth 150 pounds sterling (over $1,000)—remarkable considering the publisher originally dumped unsold copies on London pavements for four pence each, marking one of publishing's greatest reversals of fortune.

• Charles Lindbergh appears in a formal luncheon photo with President Coolidge and fellow aviators Ruth Elder, Chamberlin, and others—less than six months after his May 1927 Paris crossing. The nation was so hungry for aviation heroics that multiple record-breaking flights were happening in rapid succession, each treated as historic.
• Rear Admiral William H. Bullard, the first chairman of the Federal Radio Commission appointed by Coolidge just eight months earlier in March 1927, died suddenly of high blood pressure on November 24. The radio industry was moving so fast that its top regulator barely had time to shape it.
• The fathometer invention announced here would eventually become sonar, transforming naval warfare and oceanography—yet in 1927 it was presented as a tool to help merchants avoid shipwrecks in fog, a mundane safety device that would reshape twentieth-century conflict.
• Senator C.C. Dill of Washington predicted the Democratic candidate needed strength enough to carry both houses of Congress—a prescient observation, since the 1928 election would produce exactly the gridlock and partisan division he warned against.
• The paper mentions Ketchikan Commercial Club's demand for a hearing from Fish Commissioner Henry O'Malley about salmon regulations—a local Alaska squabble that reflects a larger pattern: federal management of resources was encroaching on regional autonomy during the 1920s, presaging the conservation vs. industry battles that would define modern politics.