In Minnesota’s roster of heirs gone bad, Duluth’s Alonzo J. Whiteman ranks high. He followed a youth of wealth, privilege, and education with a young adulthood of dazzling attainment, then decades of crime.

Brian Coyle became the first openly gay person to be elected to the Minneapolis City Council in 1983. In April 1991, he was one of the first public officials in the country to announce that he was HIV-positive.

In 1891, George Hormel established a pork packinghouse, Geo. A. Hormel and Company, in Austin, Minnesota. As a small independent meat packer in an industry dominated by corporate giants, Hormel devised a successful business strategy that emphasized quality over quantity and innovation over imitation. By the early twentieth century, his company had become one of the largest independent meatpackers in the Midwest.

In 1904, Charles W. Malchow was a professor of medicine at Hamline University Medical School who had studied abroad in Germany and England. He had a happy marriage, a medical practice in downtown Minneapolis, and a house near Lake of the Isles. He was young, handsome, successful, and ambitious. Then he went to prison.

Cecil Newman was a pioneering newspaper publisher and an influential leader in Minnesota. His newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder, provided news and information to readers while advancing civil rights, fair employment, political engagement, and Black pride.

August Ruther, who served in the German army in the 1890s, was charged with poisoning his brother-in-law in Rice County in 1917. Despite any direct evidence, a jury convicted him in eighty minutes, in large part due to anti-German nativism during World War I. His sentence was commuted to time served (eighteen years) in 1936.

Emily Grey was one of the first African Americans to settle in Old St. Anthony, where she owned and successfully operated her own business as a seamstress. She was active in religious and civic affairs and popular among Black and white residents alike. Best known for initiating the effort to free an enslaved woman named Eliza Winston in 1860, she weathered mob violence for her efforts. She rebuilt her home and business after the incident and lived in Minneapolis for the remainder of her life.

One of the most accomplished politicians in Minnesota history, Walter “Fritz” Mondale served as vice president under Jimmy Carter and ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign with running mate Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. During his long career, he advanced consumer rights as Minnesota's attorney general, maneuvered civil rights and procedural reform legislation as a US senator, and revitalized the notoriously stagnant vice presidency during the Carter administration.

Pelagie Faribault was a métis (Native and European) woman who received Wita Tanka (Big Island, also called Pike Island) from her Dakota kin as part of an 1820 treaty with the United States. The Faribault family had influence among their Dakota relatives, and Pelagie in particular was known for her acts of generosity.

Hyman Berman was a University of Minnesota history professor and a popular public historian known widely for his contributions to the Almanac public affairs program on Twin Cities PBS. Although his earliest scholarship focused on labor history, upon arriving in Minnesota in 1961 Berman wrote extensively about Minnesota’s immigrant history, the state’s political parties, and the Jewish experience in Minnesota.