The Norwegians, who first arrived in territorial days, created lasting farming settlements, especially in the Red River Valley. Their Lutheran churches continue to dot the landscape. But their experience was also urban, as they entered the trades and industries of the Twin Cities. Today, the Norwegian influence is evident in Minnesota art, culture, cuisine, and speech. Norwegian culture permeates the state's character and helps define Mi ...
Since its publication, Richard Moe's The Last Full Measure has garnered a reputation as the definitive history of the First Minnesota Regiment and one of a handful of classic regimental histories of the Civil War.<br /><br />The First Minnesota Volunteers, the first regiment offered to President Lincoln after the fall of Fort Sumter, served in virtually every major battle fought in the eastern theater during the first three y ...
This is an engaging, richly detailed biography of a family of Norwegian immigrant homesteaders in eastern North Dakota in the late 1800s. Educator and world traveler Aagot Raaen wrote this reminiscence late in her life. Like Giants in the Earth and Old Jules, Grass of the Earth deals frankly with a darker side of pioneer life on the prairie. ...
"This volume brings together an invaluable collection of vivid eyewitness accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 and its aftermath. Of greatest interest is the fact that all the narratives assembled here come from Dakota mixed-bloods and full-bloods. Speaking from a variety of viewpoints and enmeshed in complex webs of allegiances to Indian, white, and mixed-blood kin, these witnesses testify not only to the terrible casualties th ...
Government officials and missionaries wanted all Sioux men to become self-sufficient farmers, wear pants, and cut their hair. The Indians, confronted by a land-hungry white population and a loss of hunting grounds, sought to exchange title to their homeland for annuities of cash and food, schools and teachers, and farms and agricultural knowledge. By 1862 the Sioux realized that their extensive kinship network and religion were in jeopardy and t ...
What do Paul Bunyan, Charles Lindbergh, and Jesse Ventura have in common? Minnesota, of course! In A Popular History of Minnesota, historian Norman K. Risjord offers a grand tour of the state's remarkable history. This highly readable volume details everything from the glacial formation of the land to the arrival of the Dakota and the Ojibwe people, from Minnesota's contributions to the Northern cause during the Civil War to the ...
In 1861, as President Lincoln called for volunteers to defend the Union, Thomas Christie wrote to his father, voicing desires shared by many an enlistee: "I do want to 'see the world,' to get out of the narrow circle in which I have always lived, to 'make a man of myself,' and to have it to say in days to come that I, too, had a part in this great struggle."<br /><br />As it turned ou ...
The Civilian Conservation Corps—born out of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal at the height of the Great Depression—supplied jobs to more than 77,000 Minnesotans in need. Their work left a lasting legacy, visible today in Minnesota's thriving forests, state park amenities, and soil conservation practices.<br /><br />Hundreds of interviews complement oral historian Barbara Sommer's lively tex ...
Lake Superior's North Shore—the vast stretch between Duluth and Grand Portage—is nearly 150 miles long, with an abundance of state parks, state and national forests, streams and rivers, and more than thirty distinct communities representing a broad range of ethnic and religious groups. Many visitors have made the famous drive along scenic Highway 61, the central artery of this popular vacation destination, but few are ...
