In November 1998 Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler and sometime movie actor, was elected governor of Minnesota after defeating the much better-known and better-financed candidates of the two traditional major parties. He won with the lowest plurality of any Minnesota governor, 37 percent of the vote, on the ticket of the Reform Party, a tiny organization with no track record of victory. His single term was one of controversy, and media reports focused more on his pursuits of money and celebrity than on his policies, which were mostly mainstream.

About 13,000 years ago the melting glaciers that covered Minnesota and Canada created a vast lake, bigger than all the Great Lakes of today combined. Geologists later named this Lake Agassiz (AH-ga-see), for the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz. The lake drained twice: first to the south, to form the channel of the Minnesota River and the Upper Mississippi in the Twin Cities, and then, 1,600 years later, to form the course of the Red River of the North.

When Anna Salzer died while a patient at Rochester State Hospital in 1897, her death was first reported as the result of heart failure after a twelve-hour illness. Later, the cause of death was changed to pneumonia. But another patient, Lydia B. Angier, reported details about Salzer’s death to officials, writing that “every day I saw her abused—shoved about—and on the last day actually kicked.” The incident reveals how abuse contributed to excess mortality among patients confined to insane hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century.

World War I took a toll on Die Volkszeitung, St. Paul’s German-language newspaper. The long-time editor, Fritz Bergmeier, was sent to an internment camp. The paper lost its state printing contracts. Profits dwindled. After the war the paper’s owner, Clara Bergmeier, wanted to sell but found no buyers. This created an opportunity for an opportunist and con man, Clarence Cochran, to engineer a massive financial fraud aimed at German immigrants.

After the elections of 1974 the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) held both US Senate seats, all the state constitutional offices, and control of the legislature. Four years later Minnesota’s Republican Party (the Independent-Republicans, or IR) took the governorship and both US Senate seats by landslide margins while achieving an even split with Democrats in the State House of Representatives. The stunning turnaround came to be known as the Minnesota Massacre.

Former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter and his running mate, Senator Walter Mondale, overwhelmingly won the state of Minnesota and its ten electoral votes in 1976. The Democratic ticket scored a nearly thirteen-point victory (54.9 percent to 42.0 percent) over Republican President Gerald Ford and his running mate, Senator Robert Dole. The election was the third of four consecutive presidential races with a Minnesotan on the national ticket of a major party, and it marked the beginning of the longest active streak of any state voting Democratic in presidential elections.

Under the leadership of Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (later renamed the Minnesota Orchestra) ranked among the best symphonic orchestras in the nation. Critics and audiences both lauded the ensemble, especially for its contemporary music program and its extensive national tours.

Lydia B. Angier was declared insane and committed against her will to Rochester State Hospital in 1896. For the next three years, she wrote letters arguing for her release and restoration to her old life in St. Paul, where she had run a newspaper stand. Her letters provide a window into life inside hospitals for the insane at the turn of the twentieth century, where many people faced poor living conditions and abuse.

Welsch v. Likins (1974) was a landmark legal case for disability rights in Minnesota. It dealt with three issues fundamental to the disability community. First, it addressed the right to treatment under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Second, the case confronted the provision of care in the least restrictive of environments, including home and community-based services (HCBS). Third, it questioned whether institutional environments violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.

On November 7, 1987, roughly 400 people representing Minnesota’s gay community—including allies and activists—protested an AIDS conference in St. Paul sponsored by a conservative Christian political organization called the Berean League. With over 1,500 people in attendance, it was the largest gathering in the state to date addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis. It was also a show of force for fundamentalist Christians and other conservatives who opposed gay rights.