MinnesotaHistory.net

Janet D. Spector, who died on September 13, 2011, worked in the 1980s with Dakota people to study the history of Little Rapids, a 19th-century Dakota village site on the Minnesota River. This work led to her pioneering book What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. Spector’s work was pioneering not [...]

[Read more →]

In honor of the recent snowstorm of December 11, 2010, the 12-11-10 Blizzard, which hit a good part of southern Minnesota, here’s an article I wrote in 1986, on the history of Minnesota’s blizzards and how they were viewed by the people who lived through them. The article makes the point that weather is one [...]

[Read more →]

Chocolate and circuses are the legacy of the retired director of the Minnesota Historical Society, Nina Archabal. It is at best, a mixed legacy, one that present and future generations may regret. Past generations, the ones who founded the Minnesota Historical Society would regret it too, because it is so different from the purposes they [...]

[Read more →]

Todd Mahon, Executive director of the Anoka County  Historical Society, writes that he is looking for a historian to do a study of suburbanization in Anoka and Hennepin Counties in Minnesota. The work is to be funded by a a grant from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, through the Minnesota Historical Society. Here’s [...]

[Read more →]

According to a recent story on WCCO-TV, the Minnesota Historical Society says “it will expand programming to include the internment of Indians.” Let’s just see how that works for them and “the Indians.” A good test will be this weekend, when various groups will converge on the Fort Snelling area for the events described below [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s the hyper-truth, the real truth, not the truthiness, but the truth-will-set-you-free-ness, the truth that no one, even if they are people not monkeys, wants to see, touch, hear, smell, imagine, or even deny: First of all the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community is not a tribe, it’s an economic octogolopoly, I mean a sextogolopoly, made [...]

[Read more →]

By Daniel Shagobince The multifarious, extensively pervasive, unpersuasively extensive, existential influence of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and its Mystical Lake Casino is made embarrassingly clear when you go to the Star Tribune web site to read about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Wolfchild case, a decision that does a great job [...]

[Read more →]

It is no surprise that there are burial mounds in the Hennepin County community called Mound–which was actually named for that feature–as there are in many places around Lake Minnetonka. The lake was an ancient occupation site for the Dakota and other groups, though European-Americans did not know of the place until the 1820s or [...]

[Read more →]

Lucile M. Kane died on May 30, 2009. In terms of the profession of history in Minnesota, she was truly one of the “Greatest Generation.” A historian and archivist, she was committed to collecting and making available to the public the manuscript records of Minnesota’s history, for today and for tomorrow. During her years as [...]

[Read more →]

The stereotrope, invented around 1860, used stop-action photography and persistence of vision to give the illusion of motion to three-dimensional images. In this it resembles the stereotype, which certainly counts on persistent vision and is intended to give the illusion of depth to the one-dimensional. On the other hand, the idea of the trope, which [...]

[Read more →]