Future baseball hall-of-famer and Minnesota Twin Kirby Puckett is born in Chicago.

Residents of Windom, a community in southwestern Minnesota with approximately 3,000 citizens, created a musical concert series in 1948. The series’ governing body, the Windom Concert Association, became one of the longest continually operating Minnesota organizations of its kind.

The United States Olympic Hockey team defeats the Soviet Union in a match that becomes known as the Miracle on Ice.

Governor Elmer L. Andersen signs a law that identifies a Minnesota state bird: the loon.

During the Second Indochinese War between communist North Vietnam and US-backed South Vietnam (1955‒1975), the US government escalated American involvement in Southeast Asia. In response, anti-war activists and university students in Minnesota, along with demonstrators across the nation, took to the streets to protest.

Riverfest, an annual summer celebration in Windom first held in 1957, has its roots in an earlier celebration known as Flax Day. Under each name, the event has thrived and brought together people in the area for fun and festivities.

Early twentieth-century winters in Minnesota were a hardship for the state’s residents―including those of Cottonwood County. Newcomers, hearing stories about the weather, soon learned that the accounts weren't exaggerated. A few storms stand out, but the blizzard of 1936 topped them all.

“I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window, and In-Flu-Enza!” Children innocently sang this rhyme while playing and skipping rope during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which caused an estimated fifty million deaths worldwide. 675,000 of these were in the United States; over 10,000 were in Minnesota.

During the 1940s, Cottonwood County produced so many acres of flax that Windom, the county seat, came to be known as the “Flax Capital of the World.” Between 1948 and 1956, the city celebrated this distinction by hosting an annual event called Flax Day.

In the fall and early winter of 1850, the US government forced thousands of Lake Superior Ojibwe to leave their homeland in Wisconsin and gather at Sandy Lake, in Minnesota Territory, to receive an annual treaty payment. When the money never arrived and the government provided spoiled rations, many tried to return to Wisconsin. As a result, about 400 Ojibwe people died from starvation, disease, and exposure in what is known as the Sandy Lake Tragedy.