Winner of a Spur Award, presented by the Western Writers of America (WWA), for the Best Western Nonfiction Historical Book. Renowned historian Annette Atkins presents a fresh understanding of how a complex and modern Minnesota came into being in Creating Minnesota. Each chapter of this innovative state history focuses on a telling detail, a revealing incident, or a meaningful issue that illuminates a larger event, social trends, or politics during a period in our past. A three-act play about Minnesota's statehood vividly depicts the competing interests of Natives, traders, and politicians who lived in the same territory but moved in different worlds. Oranges are the focal point of a chapter about railroads and transportation: how did a St. Paul family manage to celebrate their 1898 Christmas with fruit that grew no closer than 1,500 miles from their home? A photo essay brings to life three communities of the 1920s, seen through the lenses of local and itinerant photographers. The much-sought state fish helps to explain the new Minnesota, where pan-fried walleye and walleye quesadillas coexist on the same north woods menu. In Creating Minnesota Atkins invites readers to experience the texture of people's lives through the decades, offering a fascinating and unparalleled approach to the history of our state.

A grand tour of the North Star State's geographical, political, and human history, including travelers' guides to historic destinations.

Minnesota Quilts: Creating Connections with Our Past is a unique treasury of exceptional quilts, fascinating quilters, and their stories from the Minnesota Quilt Project, whose members traveled the state for nearly twenty years, photographing and documenting quilts and interviewing quiltmakers. The result is a collection as varied and expressive as the makers themselves. From early pioneer days to the 1970s, these quilts, showcased in glorious full-color photographs, span a significant era of Minnesota and reflect our distinctive heritage. Whether you’re a quilter or someone who has a love of quilts and their history, this collection of Minnesota’s extraordinary patchworks will help you create connections with your past.

In 1862, four years after Minnesota was ratified as the thirty-second state in the Union, simmering tensions between indigenous Dakota and white settlers culminated in the violent, six-week-long U.S.-Dakota War. Hundreds of lives were lost on both sides, and the war ended with the execution of thirty-eight Dakotas on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota--the largest mass execution in American history. The following April, after suffering a long internment at Fort Snelling, the Dakota and Winnebago peoples were forcefully removed to South Dakota, precipitating the near destruction of the area's native communities while simultaneously laying the foundation for what we know and recognize today as Minnesota. In North Country: The Making of Minnesota, Mary Lethert Wingerd unlocks the complex origins of the state--origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange. Moving from the earliest years of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the western Great Lakes region to the era of French and British influence during the fur trade and beyond, Wingerd charts how for two centuries prior to official statehood Native people and Europeans in the region maintained a hesitant, largely cobeneficial relationship. Founded on intermarriage, kinship, and trade between the two parties, this racially hybridized society was a meeting point for cultural and economic exchange until the western expansion of American capitalism and violation of treaties by the U.S. government during the 1850s wore sharply at this tremulous bond, ultimately leading to what Wingerd calls Minnesota's Civil War. A cornerstone text in the chronicle of Minnesota's history, Wingerd's narrative is augmented by more than 170 illustrations chosen and described by Kirsten Delegard in comprehensive captions that depict the fascinating, often haunting representations of the region and its inhabitants over two and a half centuries. North Country is the unflinching account of how the land the Dakota named Mini Sota Makoce became the State of Minnesota and of the people who have called it, at one time or another, home.

Voyageurs National Park chronicles the complex legal and political campaign to found Minnesota's only national park. Witzig's thoroughly documented and referenced research allows him to offer a detailed view of the unanticipated disappointments and defining moments of achievement that accompanied this complicated legislative battle. Concentrating on the period from 1962 to 1975, Witzig identifies and explains the central issues surrounding the campaign including land acquisition policy, local concerns and opposition to the park, interagency conflict over inclusion of U.S. forest lands, antifederal attitudes in northeastern Minnesota, and the overstated case for the economic benefits a national park would bring. Witzig covers of the dispute over the inclusion of Crane Lake in the park and focuses on the many individuals and groups who were instrumental in the establishment of Voyageurs National Park, such as Governor Elmer L. Andersen, John A. Blatnik, Sigurd F. Olson, and Rita Shemesh.

This series covers the federal, state, and local regulations imposed on small businesses, with concise, friendly and up-to-the-minute advice on each critical step of starting your own business.

"Minnesota forged an identity during the 1970s that would persist, rightly or wrongly, for decades to come. It was a place of note and consequence--a state of presidential candidates, grassroots activism, civic engagement, environmental awareness, and Mary Tyler Moore. All these subjects and more are covered in this book"--