The fight for woman suffrage in Minnesota was well underway when the American Woman Suffrage Association held its annual convention in Minneapolis in 1885. Key leaders of the movement were on hand to speak, among them prominent Minnesota suffragists, both female and male.

Eugenie Moore Anderson emerged as a trailblazer for American women in international diplomacy during the post-World War II era. In 1949 she became the first American woman to hold the rank of ambassador.

Elmer Benson was elected in 1936 as Minnesota’s second Farmer-Labor Party governor with over 58 percent of the vote. He was defeated only two years later by an even larger margin. An outspoken champion of Minnesota’s workers and family farmers, Benson lacked the political gifts of his charismatic predecessor, Floyd B. Olson. However, many of his proposals—at first considered radical—became law in the decades that followed.

The Bisexual Organizing Project (BOP) is a nonprofit group that has supported Minnesota’s bisexual, pansexual, fluid, queer, and unlabeled (bi+) communities since 1999. BOP promotes bi+ identities as an option for those who do not fit under gay, lesbian, or straight labels. Through its flagship event, the annual BECAUSE conference (Bisexual Empowerment Conference, A United Supportive Experience), it provides one of the nation’s key forums for the discussion of bi+ issues. BOP also represents the bi+ community at Twin Cities Pride and other events of interest to LGBTQ+ communities.

John A. Brown, a Civil War veteran, settled in Cottonwood County in 1878 on land that he homesteaded near Windom. After surviving many hardships, he became one of the county’s best-known citizens and contributed significantly to its welfare and advancement.

Known as the “flapper legislator,” Myrtle Agnes Cain was a lifelong women’s rights activist and labor organizer. When she was elected to the Minnesota House in 1922, she and three other women became the state’s first female legislators.

Since 1952, the Citizens League has had a major impact on public policies in Minnesota. A group of civic leaders had the idea of inviting leaders from different parts of the community to the table to solve big policy issues. This meant bringing together lawmakers, union leaders, heads of Minnesota companies, and experts from universities and industries. As a group, these experts and leaders would study an issue and then write a research paper they could all agree on. Then they would do the political work required to make their conclusions a reality.

Many people suffered from the collapse of Wilbur Foshay’s Public Utilities Consolidated Corporation (PUCC)—chiefly the company’s investors, who lost their money, and Foshay and his associates, who went to prison. But those who suffered most were neither. The tragic figures turned out to be a juror, Genevieve Clark, and her family.

Solomon Comstock earned his law degree from the University of Michigan in 1869 but worked with railroads when prospects of finding a job in his chosen career path seemed dim. In Moorhead, he began a law partnership and traded in real estate with the Northwest Land Company. In the 1880s, he worked with James J. Hill’s Northern Pacific Railway to plat townships across Minnesota.

Between 1934 and 1945, many local advocacy and state legislative efforts were introduced to preserve the Nerstrand Woods as the last sizable remnant of Minnesota’s “Big Woods.” On March 28, 1945, the bill establishing the Nerstrand Woods State Park was approved by the legislature. It was signed by Governor Edward J. Thye on April 2.

Ignatius Donnelly was the most widely known Minnesotan of the nineteenth century. As a writer, orator, and social thinker, he enjoyed fame in the U.S. and overseas. As a politician he was the nation's most articulate spokesman for Midwestern populism. Though the highest office he held was that of U.S. congressman, he shaped Minnesota politics for more than thirty years.