President Barack Obama starts a three-day bus tour with a town hall meeting in Cannon Falls. After the meeting his motorcade travels down Highway 52 through Zumbro, Rochester, Chatfield, Fountain, Preston, and Harmony on its way to the Seed Exchange in Decorah, Iowa.
A shutdown of the state government begins and lasts twenty days. During the shutdown all non-critical state services are closed and an estimated 19,000 employees are laid off.
After reaching the mandatory retirement age of seventy, former Minnesota Viking Alan Page retires from the Minnesota Supreme Court. Page served on the court for twenty-two years.
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.
Norm Coleman is elected US Senator, defeating Walter Mondale by 2 percentage points. Mondale is a replacement candidate for Paul Wellstone, who was killed in a plane crash on October 25, 2002.
St. Paul in the late 1920s and early 1930s was known as a “‘crooks’ haven”—a place for gangsters, bank robbers, and bootleggers from all over the Midwest to run their operations or to hide from the FBI. The concentration of local organized crime activity prompted reformers and crime reporters to call for a “cleanup” of the city in the mid-1930s.
The Hmong New Year in St. Paul is a unique annual event encapsulated into a weekend celebration held at the end of November. Since 1977, Hmong people have gathered in the city to meet, eat, celebrate the harvest, and enjoy cultural performances. Though the event is rooted in the agricultural history of the Hmong people and their religious traditions, it has found a new expression in St. Paul—the home of one of the largest communities of Hmong outside Southeast Asia.
During the summer of 1916, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) coordinated a strike of iron ore miners on the Mesabi Iron Range. The strikers fought for higher wages, an eight-hour workday, and workplace reform. Although the strike failed, it was one of the largest labor conflicts in Minnesota history.
