Through the NFO, Minnesota farmers sought to use collective bargaining to fight corporatization of agriculture
Minnesota NFO and county chapters encouraged farm communities to support each other and challenge the farm-product pricing system.
MNopedia
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.
The short history of the Minnesota Twins’ Calvin Griffith memorial
The Twins included a statue of the owner that brought the team to Minnesota in a series of memorials erected when Target Field opened in 2010. By 2020, the organization removed the statue, acknowledging Griffith’s open racism.
Minnesota’s Grand Portage National Monument protects a trading route use by people in northern Minnesota for centuries
The Grand Portage is an ancient overland trail used by Indigenous peoples since at least the start of the first millennium CE.
One of the first women elected to the Minnesota Legislature, Sue Metzger Dickey Hough backed gun control — and more hangings
Hough was described in the local press as “one of the ardent advocates of hanging.”
Ray and Ester Dowidat’s film ‘Cologne’ is a portrait of a Carver County German enclave near the end of the Great Depression
In 2001, the Librarian of Congress selected “Cologne” as one of twenty-five films that year for the National Film Registry, an inventory of significant American films.
A brief history of Minnesota’s Superior National Forest
The area comprises three million acres of boreal forest in northern Minnesota.
A 1914 Minneapolis Journal headline said Mary Fridley Price died trying to save her dog. It turned out she was murdered.
The murdered woman’s father suspected her husband and hired a private investigator whose efforts eventually helped uncover the truth.
How Democratic chair Leonard August Rosing helped break a nearly 4-decade streak of the Republican control of the Minnesota governorship
Rosing started his political career with the Republicans but changed parties over disagreement with the national party’s tax policies.
How Minnesota’s smallest state park came to be
Franz Jevne State Park consists of just 120 acres on the shores of the Rainy River.
The Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association created employment for women on Minnesota reservations
Native lace makers earned good pay, but the organization held stereotypical and negative views of them and excluded them from leadership roles.
As St. Paul’s first city architect, Charles A. Hausler left a mark on the capital’s built environment
Hausler designed libraries, schools and other civic buildings around St. Paul.
From vaudeville to nightclubs: Drag performance in Minnesota at the turn of the 20th century
Theater allowed drag performers to evade laws banning “cross-dressing.”
Why a new statue of Ojibwe leader Shaynowishkung was created to stand on the shores of Lake Bemidji
The statue replaced a 1952 wooden sculpture that some saw as an offensive caricature of a Native American man.
How publisher Cecil Newman made his mark on the Minnesota newspaper industry
In both the Minneapolis Spokseman and the St. Paul Recorder, Newman pledged to “speak out fearlessly and unceasingly against injustices, discriminations, and all imposed inequities.”
Churchwoman, suffragist, organizer, singer: The life of St. Paul’s Nellie Francis
Francis pressed the limits of what an African American woman was permitted to achieve in early twentieth-century Minnesota.
How there came to be a statue of Leif Erikson on the grounds of the Minnesota Capitol
The memorial was part of the Scandinavian American community’s efforts to credit their ancestors — not Christopher Columbus — with the “discovery” of the Americas.
A brief overview of queer and trans history in Minnesota
There have always been people in Minnesota, as in the rest of the world, who have lived outside perceived norms of gender and sexuality; the words used to name them have changed over time.
New Ulm’s Minnesota Music Hall of Fame museum focuses on mid-20th-century musicians
By midcentury, due to the popularity of 18 professional bands with local roots, New Ulm was referred to as the Polka Capital of the Nation.
When St. Paul’s first High Bridge opened in 1889, it was one of tallest and longest bridges in the U.S.
The finished product — 2,770 feet long, 191 feet tall at its highest point, and made mostly of wrought iron — made the High Bridge a marvel of its time for the combination of height and length.
Was German Minnesota immigrant August Ruther a poisoner or a victim of prejudice?
Despite any direct evidence, a jury convicted Ruther of the murder of his brother-in-law after just eighty minutes of deliberations.
