When the Fifth Infantry Regiment came west in 1819 to build a fort on the bluff where the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers flow together, some of the soldiers brought their wives and daughters with them. Women and girls made up around 20 percent of the fort’s population from the time of the first census in 1849 until at least 1900. They included the wives and daughters of officers but also lower-class women (wives and daughters of enlisted men, as well as their servants).

The Brown Berets in Minnesota were a chapter of a national Chicano organization founded in Los Angeles in 1968. They emerged from the Mexican American barrio of Westside St. Paul and came together in 1969. Members took pride in their ethnic and racial identities as Chicanos while focusing on outreach to prevent Mexican American youth from engaging in criminalized activities.

Theatre de la Jeune Lune was a theater company formed in 1978 in Paris by Dominique Serrand, Barbra Berlovitz, and Vincent Gracieux, all of whom studied at the École Internationale de Théâtre with Jacques Lecoq. In 1985 it moved to Minneapolis, where it grew to include actor and co-artistic director Steven Epp. The company was renowned for its ensemble work and experimental plays and won a Tony Award for best regional theater in 2005. After the economic recession of 2008, it found itself in debt and was forced to close.

The National Woman’s Party (NWP) was a suffrage organization that emphasized civil disobedience and direct action in its fight for the right to vote. St. Paul nurse Sarah Colvin established its Minnesota chapter in 1916. Though its forceful approach frustrated some, the NWP lent a transformative sense of urgency and focus to Minnesota’s suffrage movement.

Over the course of their history, Minnesota’s state hospitals were home to tens of thousands of people with disabilities or diagnoses of psychiatric conditions. Around 13,000 of those who died at these institutions were buried in hospital cemeteries, in graves marked only with numbers. Remembering With Dignity is a group formed from members of Advocating Change Together and other self-advocacy organizations in 1994 with the goal of installing new gravestones in these cemeteries marked with names and dates in order to restore personhood to those denied it in the past.

In 1970, the American Indian Movement (AIM) declared its intention to open a school for Native youth living in Minneapolis. AIM had identified the urgent need for Indigenous children to be educated within their own communities. Two years later, Heart of the Earth Survival School opened its doors, providing hope to Native families whose children had endured the racial abuse prevalent in the Minneapolis public schools.

Around midnight on July 10, 1970, four teams of two or three people each broke into Selective Service offices in Little Falls, Alexandria, Winona, and Wabasha, intending to destroy as many military draft files as possible—acts of protest against the war in Vietnam. They mostly failed. Eight of them were arrested and charged with federal crimes. They became known as the Minnesota Eight.

The Minnesota Twins—the first franchise from Minnesota to compete in Major League Baseball (MLB)—made their debut in the 1961 season. They have appeared in three World Series (1965, 1987, and 1991) and won two World Series titles (1987 and 1991).

From its early beginnings on Lake Superior’s North Shore to its legacy of innovative manufacturing in St. Paul, 3M—formerly known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company—has introduced both consumer and industrial products that have been successfully marketed worldwide.

The Minnesota North Stars were one of the teams created during the National Hockey League’s first expansion in 1966, which finally brought an NHL team to the “state of hockey.” Their twenty-nine-year residency in the state produced two trips to the Stanley Cup finals, but their sudden departure to Dallas in 1993 shocked fans throughout Minnesota.