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.
Gomez-Bethke served as Minnesota Commissioner of Human Rights, guided boards and commissions as a volunteer, and co-founded both Centro Cultural Chicano and Instituto de Arte y Cultura.
Though she often escaped the public eye, her work survives through her children and community, the attendees of survival schools, and the children protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act.
The rustic cabin was built by Jun Fujita, one of the first prominent Japanese Americans in the Midwest.
Agricultural societies held fairs in Minnesota Territory as far back as the early 1850s.
Since its founding in 1859, the Minnesota State Fair had been an essential yearly tradition in the agricultural state. However, after the United States entered World War I in 1917, the fair took on an entirely new significance.
It formed in 1981 in St. Paul in response to the need for language-appropriate, culturally competent mental health services for the Latino Spanish-speaking community.
While recovering from a fall in 1971, Robert Asp read a book on Viking shipbuilding. This sparked a thought.
In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon failed twice to fill an opening on the Supreme Court when the Senate rejected first Clement Haynsworth, then Harrold Carswell. On his third try Nixon chose Blackmun.
The name “Aquatennial” was chosen by contest to highlight the abundance of lakes, rivers, and parks around Minneapolis.
Entire families came up from Texas for the sugar beet planting season and harvest, and American Crystal provided housing.
Centro’s mission and values are grounded in supporting the well-being of Latine families through a holistic approach to education and family engagement.
The theater company is one of the few founded during the Black Arts Movement that survived into the twenty-first century.
The plaque at the west entrance lists Frank X. Tewes, who supervised Clarence “Cap” Wigington, as the tower’s architect. Wigington’s initials on project drawings, however, provide evidence that he was its designer.
Before settler-colonists came to present-day Minnesota, Indigenous people understood variations in gender and sexuality in the contexts of their own languages and lifeways.
Born into slavery in 1852, Honeycutt set a course for himself that led from Civil War battlefields in Tennessee to freedom in the North.
One of Minnesota’s most popular nature areas, Gooseberry Falls was the first of eight state parks developed along Lake Superior’s North Shore.
On May 3, 1905, as she forged through a northeaster en route to Duluth, the crew lost its bearings and the ship was thrown against a reef near present-day Silver Bay.
On Nov. 6, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 Black infantrymen from their battalion at Fort Brown, Texas when they refused to falsely confess to participation in a Brownsville, Texas, riot three months earlier.
Its owner, W. H. C. Folsom, designed it to be both modest and a showcase of his well-established wealth.
Wards 1 and 3 in Northeast Minneapolis have been the center of the Twin Cities’ Ukrainian community since the late nineteenth century.
