Watt Munisotaram—the only Cambodian Buddhist temple in Minnesota and the largest in the US—sits on a forty-acre rural site about thirty minutes south of St. Paul. Although its founding organization, the Minnesota Cambodian Buddhist Society, was established in 1982, it was not until 2007 that members consecrated a temple on forty acres of their own land.

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.

Hallie Q. Brown Community Center (HQB) was founded in 1929 to support the growing Black community of St. Paul. Established to promote social harmony and help people find adequate housing, HQB also provided a place of refuge and solace. It became the second-largest neighborhood center in St. Paul, complementing the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House in Minneapolis.

Purple Rain is the title of both a film and an album by Prince, released in 1984. The album gave the twenty-six-year-old Minneapolis native his first Number One hits, and the movie, while not critically lauded, was a box office success. The film, album, and subsequent worldwide tour propelled Prince’s rising star into the stratosphere, making him as famous as contemporaries like Michael Jackson and Madonna.

In 1982, apple variety MN 1711 at the University of Minnesota’s apple breeding program was saved from the reject pile by horticulturist David Bedford and given another year to prove itself worthy of a patent. The apple, renamed Honeycrisp™, became Minnesota’s official state fruit and one of the most popular apple varieties in the nation.

Cherokee Park, located in the West Side neighborhood of St. Paul, is a regional park comprising 100 acres of forested bluff and blufftop parklands along the Mississippi River. The St. Paul Park Board first established a ten-acre section of the park in 1905 near the High Bridge, with subsequent expansions in 1906, the 1910s, and the 1970s. The park is well known for its spectacular view of the Mississippi River Valley, and of both downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis.

The Minneapolis Sound is a music genre popularized by Prince and his many side bands, including Morris Day and The Time, the Family, Vanity 6, and Apollonia 6, as well as Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (working most notably with Janet Jackson) and the Jets. The Minneapolis Sound defined the sonic landscape of the 1980s and 1990s with its heavy punk- and rock-guitar solos, hard-driving, funky bass lines, and synth-forward, new-wave pop sensibilities. In the twenty-first century, it continues to influence artists like Janelle Monáe, Lizzo, Bruno Mars, and Brittany Howard.

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.