An effort to move the Red Lake County seat from Red Lake Falls to Thief River Falls in 1909 divided the citizens of the county. A suspicious courthouse fire on April 23 of that year brought the situation to a head.

From 1890 to 1910, timber speculators and lumbermen patented most of the valuable pine lands in north-central Minnesota—the homeland of the Bois Forte Ojibwe. By the 1920s, dams and deforestation had so damaged the landscape that it could no longer support the tribe’s subsistence economy, and its members were forced onto their reservation at Nett Lake.

In the 1950s, planned construction of Interstate Highway 94 (I-94) threatened to fracture four Twin Cities neighborhoods: Rondo, Prospect Park, Merriam Park, and Seward. Although each community responded differently and achieved different results, all were models of persistence and resistance.

In early 1953 Minnesota’s new US Attorney, George MacKinnon, began an attack on organized interstate prostitution in the Upper Midwest, centered in Minnesota on John’s Bar and Funhouse in Northeast Minneapolis. When the campaign ended in mid-1956, John’s Bar had lost its license, and 110 men and women had been convicted of violating the Mann Act.

In 1969, members of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005 called a strike against Twin City Lines (TCL), the metropolitan area’s largest privately owned bus company. Most union members and patrons probably didn’t realize it at the time, but that strike would prove to be a critical turning point for Twin Cities public transit. It would provide the opportunity for public acquisition of the company and dramatic service improvements.

The I-35W (Interstate 35 West) bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis opened to traffic in 1967. Thousands of vehicles drove across it every day, but no one imagined that a mistake in the bridge’s design, made over forty years prior, would have such disastrous consequences on one summer evening in August of 2007.

In 1952 Russell Heim (1886–1960) was a practicing physician and, after 1942, Hennepin County’s elected coroner. The Minneapolis Star called his narcotics prosecution “one of the most sensational trials of a public official…in the history of Minnesota federal courts.”

In the winter of 1959–1960 a bitter packing-house workers’ strike against Wilson & Company in Albert Lea descended into such disorder that Governor Orville Freeman declared martial law. A federal district court later ruled his order unlawful.

On Saturday, November 12, 1955, Kenneth E. Lindberg, cashier of the Northern State Bank of Thief River Falls, met in the bank with a man who had identified himself as Herbert Johnson of the Johnson Wax Company. Lindberg was never seen alive again in Thief River Falls again.

On August 17, 1985, about 1,500 Hormel Foods Corporation workers went on strike at the meat-processing plant at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Minnesota. The strikers, members of United Food and Commercial Workers’ Local P-9, cited a wage freeze, dangerous working conditions, and a wage cut as the reasons for the strike, which continued for thirteen months. New non-union workers were hired and the National Guard was called to protect them, drawing global attention. The conflict is heralded as one of the most contentious and longest-running strikes in Minnesota history.