Music fans in Moorhead await the arrival of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper at the city's Armory Building, the next stop of their scheduled tour. But the performance never takes place. The airplane carrying the trio crashes while passing over Clear Lake, Iowa, on its way to the North Star State, killing everyone on board.

In September 1903, workers in the Minneapolis flour milling industry coordinated a strike that halted production in fourteen different mills. The striking workers fought for higher wages and an eight-hour day. Though their effort failed, it marked a turning point in the city’s labor history by spurring mill owners and other business leaders to limit unions through the Citizens Alliance, an anti-worker organization.

One of the most credible UFO (unidentified flying object) encounters in American history unfolded in Minnesota in 1979. Marshall County Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson never claimed that he saw aliens or spaceships—merely that a force he could not identify collided with his car, cracking its windshield and leaving him unconscious. Johnson’s reasonable testimony and the evidence left behind on his vehicle made the event a popular case among those who study unidentified aerial phenomena.

More than 1,000 left-wing protesters gathered at the Minnesota Capitol. on April 4, 1937, to support Governor Elmer Benson as he tried to persuade the legislature to pass a $17 million aid package for the unemployed. About 200 of the protesters stayed overnight in the senate chamber after someone jimmied open the doors with a knife, and two organizers were later convicted of the gross misdemeanor of preventing senators from assembling.

The Minnesota legislature ratifies the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, granting women the right to vote. Prior to this federal amendment, the state's women had been permitted to vote only in elections for school officials and library officials, since 1876 and 1898, respectively. Women had been permitted to vote for presidential electors since March 24, 1919, but a presidential election allowing them to exercise that right was not held until 1920.

The November 1914 death of Mary Fridley Price made the front page of the Minneapolis Journal: “Woman Killed in Attempt to Save Pet Dog.” Her grieving husband, Fred Price, told police she had fallen off a Mississippi River bluff in a vain attempt to keep her dog from going over. But by January 1916, that grieving husband was at the center of a sensational murder trial, accused of shoving her off the cliff for her money.

Sometime past midnight on Friday, November 1, 1907, “the ringing of a fire bell rang out,” as reported in the Hastings Democrat. Brown’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) was engulfed in flames. The little white frame church that had stood on the corner of Fifth and Sibley Streets had been established by the Black residents of Hasting’s community. Two weeks prior, they had celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of “having a place of their own."

Beulah Brunelle (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) and Edna Larrabee escaped from Shakopee State Reformatory for Women five times between 1946 and 1949. Though most of the breakouts ended in their recapture within a few days, their fourth escape, in 1949, led to eight months of freedom and allowed the two women to live together as a couple while traveling around the United States.

A fire inside a stable kills 128 trained horses belonging to Battery F of the 14th Field Artillery at Fort Snelling.

Cecelia Regina Gonzaga, an African American assigned a male sex at birth, lived in St. Paul for four weeks during the summer of 1885. After a police officer arrested her for wearing women’s clothes on August 20, he took her into custody and questioned her at the Ramsey County Courthouse. He released her later the same day, but Gonzaga quickly left the city by train and returned to St. Louis.