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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Bureaucratic approaches to the study of history and culture are fundamentally authoritarian. Understanding bureaucratic knowledge-gathering and bureaucracies in general requires ethnographic knowledge, including the folk knowledge, traditions, and practices of bureaucrats, which is sometimes only retrievable through the Freedom of Information Act.

Bureaucrats insist on the codification of rules for gathering and interpreting history. Though apparently scientific and unbiased in nature these rules are self-serving for the bureaucrat, serving the goals of government agencies or private bureaucracies. It is always easier when dealing with information that is challenging to the position of the bureaucrat if one can question its adherence to a set of bureaucratically-established rules, rather than deal with the meaning of the information itself. Similarly, it is easier to call attention to…

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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The center’s collections contain thousands of cubic feet of unpublished materials including government records, personal records, church records, and records of numerous business, civic, and social organizations.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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Henry Ford, or maybe it was Harry Truman, said that the trouble with history was that it was “one damn thing after another.” Other people say that historians are god-like because they can make history in their own image. George Santayana said “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sergeant Joe Friday, on the show Dragnet said: “All we want are the facts.” Patricia Hampl wrote at the beginning of her poem Resort: “The point of this place: don’t ask for much, ask/ for everything. Get: details as everywhere.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that everyone was entitled to his or her own opinion but no one was entitled to his or her own set of facts.

All of these…

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My mother, who was a tenacious historian, used to ask, when she was involved in some particularly difficult historical research: “If I were that piece of paper where would I be?” She practiced a kind of method-historical research, in which she thought about the process through which the information might have been written, collected, and stored in order to determine where the information might have ended up. As a result she found documents that no one else could find, and tracked down answers to questions that other people thought could not be answered.

Many people think that all it takes to researching and writing about a historical topic is to go into a library or archives and find the books and folders…

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