The Bach Society of Minnesota was founded in 1933 by students at the University of Minnesota who wanted to perform music of the great Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. One of the oldest Bach societies in the United States, the ensemble features the timeless music of both Bach and those he inspired.

When Jack Baker and Michael McConnell became the first same-sex couple in the United States to apply for a marriage license, in 1970, Hennepin County clerk Gerald R. Nelson rejected their application. They then sued Nelson, claiming a constitutional right to marry in what would become a landmark Supreme Court Case.

Often, the first structure built by Finnish immigrants to Minnesota was a sauna. That was the case with the Barberg-Selvälä-Salmonson sauna in Cokato—the oldest savusauna, or smoke sauna, still existing in Minnesota and likely in the United States.

The Barker‒Karpis gang, a revolving cast of Midwestern criminals, shuttled in and out of St. Paul in the 1930s, committing robberies and kidnappings under the protection of a corrupt police force.

In 1895, the Polish immigrant community in Winona raised funds to construct St. Stanislaus Kostka, the grand church dominating the city’s skyline. The church, which still serves the East End parish, was listed on the National Register in 1984 and elevated to a minor basilica of the Catholic Church in 2011.

The last in a series of violent conflicts between Dakota and Ojibwe people took place on the banks of the Minnesota River north of the village of the Dakota leader Shakpedan (Little Six) on May 27, 1858. Dozens of Ojibwe and Dakota warriors engaged in fighting that claimed lives on both sides but produced no clear victor.

Bean Lake Resort, a forerunner of twenty-first-century theme parks, was a popular entertainment destination from the early 1920s to 1947. People from areas around the lake in northwestern Cottonwood County gathered there to enjoy band concerts, water activities, roller-skating, and other activities.

On August 21, 1965, the Beatles played their one and only concert in Minnesota. Beatlemania was in full throat that night at Metropolitan Stadium, where the screaming fans drowned out the group’s half-hour set. But the hijinks had only just begun. In an episode straight from the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night, the band's sleepover at the Minneapolis Leamington Motor Inn involved chases between fans and hotel security, a limo driver roped in for off-duty crowd control, a reporter disguised as a waitress, and the police.

The Beltrami County Courthouse, located at 619 Beltrami Avenue in Bemidji, is a three-story red brick and sandstone structure in the Beaux Arts style and the county’s most imposing example of public architecture.

The Beltrami Island Project was a pioneering land program of the New Deal enacted across hundreds of thousands of acres in northern Minnesota. Federal and state governments worked side by side to move residents off of poor farmland as well as to restore forest across areas of the cutover region.

For five decades, Bemidji’s public library operated in a one-story, brick-and-stone neo-classical structure designed by Haxby & Gillespie and built in 1909. It is a well-preserved example of the libraries throughout Minnesota—and the United States—that were financed by Andrew Carnegie.

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.