MinnesotaHistory.net

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 how the grant application explained the topic of study and below that is the job announcement:

The phenomenon of suburbanization has had a huge impact on the lives of Minnesotans.  The populations shifts away from the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul and from rural areas to suburban communities of the Twin Cities metro area has changed the state’s political makeup, its natural environment, its…

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Former director of the Minnesota Historical Society Russell W. Fridley died on June 17, 2010. He was director of the Historical Society for thirty years, during a dynamic and formative period of the institution’s history. He had a true commitment to history in all its forms. He believed that popular and scholarly history were compatible and that neither would diminish the other. For Russell Fridley history was a big tent and all kinds of history could exist there. No history of any kind diminished any other kind of history. But he was a supporter of detailed, well-researched, and well-documented history. He supported new ideas when they came along. When someone came to him with a new idea, he was always…

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Robin Johnson of Alexandria, Minnesota, says in a recent letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “until Minnesota adults stop thinking of their state’s history and culture as being the almost sole province of children, the complex arguments [about the history of Historic Fort Snelling] will never make an appearance inside the forts, museums or zoos.”

Johnson’s letter to the Star Tribune is part of a continuing a debate about the Historic Fort Snelling and the way it is being interpreted by the Minnesota Historical Society, fostered by the efforts of Waziyatawin and others to call for the tearing down Fort Snelling physically and symbolically.  Nick Coleman wrote a column on June 7, entitled Minnesota’s Cradle and Stain, raising questions about whether the…

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Here’s an email from Martha Fast Horse who has a Sunday morning radio show on KQRS radio in the Twin Cities, concerning continuing problems with the famous Shock Jock Tom Barnard who calls KQRS his home.

KQRS  apologized and said they would makes changes, but that was a lie…

Tom Barnard and his crew have been harassing me on-air since I began recording my radio show at KQRS 2 1/2 years ago. Two weeks ago I sent Tom a letter and cc’d the president and program manager asking him to stop the racist, highly inappropriate, vulgar, and offensive remarks effective immediately. There was communication, I gave it a chance, and nothing has changed. Tom is a bully of the airwaves! And even if I…

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Here are some real plans that people are talking about for what to do about Fort Snelling and keep it from being attacked. You are going to want to read this because it is very topical,  including all the parts some of you campers will not like at all.

The guy who runs this website, that “White” guy, is telling me to stop talking trash about those rich people on the Minnesota River just south of Bloomington because other people are giving him carp about it and talking about sovereignty, which is really scary. OK, I get the message. I’m a changed person of infindecimal characteristics and I will try harder because that is completely, exactly how vaguely defined I am.

So,…

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Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her 1999 opinion upholding hunting and fishing rights in the case of Minnesota v. Mille Lacs: “We interpret Indian treaties to give effect to the terms as the Indians themselves would have understood them.” She said that to interpret the meaning of specific treaty provisions, one had to look “beyond the written words to the larger context” that framed the treaty—the history of the negotiations and the “practical construction adopted by the parties.”

Stories and articles have recently appeared in Minnesota newspapers and other media about assertions of hunting and fishing rights under the 1855 Ojibwe treaty, which covers a large chunk of northern Minnesota. Since I was an expert witness for the Mille Lacs Band of…

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What will happen to the endangered archival collection in the Iron Range Research Center (IRRC) on the campus of the Minnesota Discovery Center (MDC), formerly known as Ironworld Discovery Center? The fate of the archives, which opened in 1980, is up in the air because of the closing of the center in the fall of 2009, due to funding cutbacks.

The center’s collections contain thousands of cubic feet of unpublished materials including government records, personal records, church records, and records of numerous business, civic, and social organizations. They include the papers of former governor Rudy Perpich, mining company newsletters, maps, photographs – many very rare, oral histories, and microfilmed newspapers. According to Barbara Sommer, whose book, Hard Work and a Good…

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