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A resource for reliable information about significant people, places, events, and things in Minnesota history.
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December 1
| 1855 |
At the Washington Navy Yard, Susan L. Mann christens the steam frigate Minnesota with a bottle of Minnesota water. On April 6 of the previous year, Congress had authorized construction of this ship and, coincidentally, the frigate Merrimac. Rebuilt as a Confederate ironclad and renamed the Virginia, it would attack the Minnesota during the Civil War. |
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| 1856 |
The first issue of Ignatius Donnelly's newspaper the Emigrant Aid Journal is published in Philadelphia. The publication encourages recent immigrants to move to Nininger, a town Donnelly had founded on the Mississippi River downstream from St. Paul. Although 1,000 people lived there at its peak, the town would eventually fail. The editor of the Emigrant Aid Journal was A. W. MacDonald, who would later edit Scientific American. |
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| 1860 |
The state's first book-quality paper, manufactured at the Cutter and Secombe paper mill in St. Anthony, is used in the Minnesota Farmer and Gardener, an agricultural magazine. |
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| 1941 |
Against a background of war in Europe and bitter pro- and anti-union activity in the Twin Cities, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party are found guilty in Minneapolis on a count of conspiring to undermine the loyalty of U.S. military forces and of publishing material advocating the overthrow of the government. Vincent R. Dunne, a leader in Teamsters Local 544, and the other defendants are, however, found not guilty on a count of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government by force. Five more defendants, also party members, are acquitted on both counts. |
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| 1982 |
Clement Haupers dies in St. Paul, in the same Ramsey Hill house in which he was born in 1900. Known for developing the Minnesota State Fair art show into a major exhibition of local work, he also led the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in Minnesota. Throughout his career, Haupers insisted that artists should support themselves without government grants. In this vein, when asked to give art students a lecture on how to survive financially, Haupers responded, "Sure, that'll be $150." |
 Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater, Minnesota’s oldest prison, was built in Stillwater as the Territorial Prison in 1853. It moved to a location in what is now Bayport between 1910 and 1914. MCF-Stillwater has been the site of multiple rebellions and also publishes the Prison Mirror, likely the oldest continuously operated prisoner newspaper in the US. |
 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). |
Made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008. Administered by the Minnesota Historical Society.
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