. >> kim owen was a professor at the state university of louisiana, and he became the consultant forhe committee on style and drafting. i can hear him in his southern brogue: "the language must sing," and he helped to make the language sing. the clarity and the simplicity and the directness that you see expressed in the original constitution came largely from the work of george sundborg and kim owen. >> i think, not just because i was a member of it or because i'm one of the last five members of the constitution, that it was a good document. i think that historians and i think people in the political arena have always said, since we got out of the convention in 1956, that it was a model convention, that it was a model structure. >> narrator: in 1867, secretary of state william henry seward negotiated the purchase of alaska from imperial russia, but few americans understood why. described as seward's folly and utterly worthless by opponents in congress and across the country, alaska was unknown and unwanted by all but a few. but seward had a vision for america as a great sea power in