Each week, MinnPost brings you a highlight of our state’s past from MNopedia, an encyclopedia of Minnesota history written by experts and produced by the Minnesota Historical Society.
This content is shared with MinnPost by MNopedia, the digital encyclopedia created by the Minnesota Historical Society and supported by the Legacy Amendment’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
In 1937, Parks was waiting tables on a train when he came across images of Depression-era migrant workers taken by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers. He was inspired to buy a camera at a pawn shop and became a self-taught photographer.
In the Ojibwe language, wild rice (Zizania palustris) is called manoomin, meaning “good berry,” “harvesting berry,” or “wondrous grain.”
AIM had identified the urgent need for Indigenous children to be educated within their own communities.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art opened in 1915, an outgrowth of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts.
Along with a large assembly hall, the building featured a bowling alley, a social hall, a maplewood dance floor, and a children’s play area.
Forty percent of the area of Voyageurs is covered in lakes.
Crowning the monument is a statue of Josias R. King, who is widely regarded as the first US volunteer in the Civil War. King also participated in violent campaigns to punish Dakota people after the US-Dakota War of 1862, known as the Punitive Expeditions.
Around midnight on July 10, 1970, four teams of two or three people each broke into Selective Service offices in Little Falls, Alexandria, Winona, and Wabasha, intending to destroy as many military draft files as possible.
Kegg’s life was life guided by cultural traditions, continuous adaptation to a fast-changing world, and an inherent skill for interpreting her people’s culture and history.
Olson’s conservation efforts in the Quetico-Superior region aided in the establishment of Voyageurs National Park (the name is credited to Olson) and the designation of the BWCA as a wilderness area in 1978.
Since the 1890s, the Mesabi has produced iron ore that boosted the national economy, contributed to the Allied victory in World War II, and cultivated a multiethnic regional culture in northeast Minnesota.
The Kensington Runestone has provoked a host of scholarly and popular articles and books. The Minnesota Historical Society library carries more than forty titles on the subject.
By the late 1950s, populations of House districts ranged from 7,290 residents to 107,246, and Senate districts from 16,878 to 153,455.
Theaters such as the Orpheum, the Pence Opera House and the Academy of Music (Minneapolis) all hosted the performances.
The appeal of hunting ginseng came from the cash paid for it — hard currency was scarce after the financial crash of 1857.
On April 11, 1889, six hundred Minneapolis streetcar drivers walked off the job. Three hundred St. Paul drivers and other workers struck the following morning.
After years of effort on the part of Charles Fremont Dight and his Eugenics Society, the Minnesota legislature passed a law authorizing sterilization of the “feebleminded” and the “insane” in 1925.
A brief history of the Northwest Trail.
The trained chef moved from managing large industrial cafeterias to owning successful catering businesses.
A fire survivor described Hinckley as occupying “a hole cut in the brush lands and for miles in all directions young trees, huge stumps, and fallen logs covered the land.”
