The Minnesota Lynx win their first WNBA Championship, beating the Atlanta Dream in three games. This is the first championship won by a professional sports team in Minnesota since 1991.

Marcelina Anaya Vasquez, founder in 1970 of the Migrant Tutorial program, dies. Working in St. Paul's west side, Vasquez trained bilingual tutors to assist migrant children with their English reading and writing skills. The St. Paul school district had taken over her successful program in 1978.

The state constitution is ratified by popular vote. In the accompanying gubernatorial election, Henry H. Sibley beats Alexander Ramsey by a slim margin of 240 votes out of 35,340 cast.

Author Kathleen Winsor is born in Olivia. Her novel Forever Amber, published in 1944, would be banned in Boston because of its sexual content. With that publicity, it became a best seller.

The cities of Grand Rapids and Minneapolis, as well as Minnesota State University, Mankato, celebrate Inidgenous Peoples' Day in place of Columbus Day for the first time.

Future Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas is born in Maine, Minnesota. Briefly a resident of the state, Douglas would move further west while he was an infant as his family sought a climate more accommodating to his nearly crippling polio.

Minnesota's first pheasant season begins in Hennepin and Carver Counties. The ring-necked pheasant had been introduced to the state from China in 1905, and it would eventually become Minnesota's most important upland game bird.

The state celebrates Henry H. Wade Day in honor of the inventor of enriched taconite, a product that has kept the iron range and its ports operating for years.

William R. Marshall is born near Columbia, Missouri. As an adult he moved to Minnesota, owned a hardware store in St. Paul, founded the St. Paul Press in 1861, and fought with the Seventh Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the Civil War. As the fifth governor of the state, he advocated extending the right to vote to African American men. That law was passed in 1868, two years before the fifteenth amendment extended suffrage nationwide. He died on January 8, 1896.

Rochester declares an air pollution alert and earns the dubious distinction of having the highest carbon monoxide levels recorded in the state. This and other alerts in the state during the early 1970s were caused by stagnant weather systems that did not blow away industrial and automobile emissions.

Land in central Minnesota is set aside for the Mamaceqtaw (Menominee). The tribe decides not to move from their holdings in Wisconsin and cedes the proposed reservation to the state on May 5, 1854.

The Agriculture School of the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus, which was known as University Farm, opens with forty-seven students and W. W. Pendergast as principal.