Seth Eastman was a soldier and an artist stationed at Fort Snelling in the 1830s and 1840s. As MN90 producer Marisa Helms reports, Eastman’s greatest contribution to history was his accurate and un-romanticized depictions of Dakota and Ojibwe people in the area of the fort. Because Eastman took an anthropological view in his art, today’s historians can learn about Native practices and cultural artifacts from the era.

Britt Aamodt reports on Alonzo J. Whiteman, a Minnesota legislator from Duluth. By the time he died in 1922, Whiteman was wanted in forty cities, with more than forty arrests and eleven convictions to his name.

MN90: At home on the Iron Range – Restoring a Jewish legacy in Virginia, MN

August Wilson (1945–2005) is among America’s most critically acclaimed playwrights. He penned several groundbreaking plays while living in St. Paul in the 1980s, including Pulitzer Prize winners Fences and The Piano Lesson. They are both part of Wilson’s magnum opus: a series of ten historical plays called the Pittsburgh Cycle. In the series, each decade of the twentieth century is represented through a play, exploring the cultural, spiritual, and daily lives of African Americans. MN90 producer Marisa Helms reports.