The Beltrami Island Project was a pioneering land program of the New Deal enacted across hundreds of thousands of acres in northern Minnesota. Federal and state governments worked side by side to move residents off of poor farmland as well as to restore forest across areas of the cutover region.

Two of Duluth's oldest Jewish congregations—Temple Emanuel and Tifereth Israel—had little in common after they were founded in the 1890s. While Temple Emanuel was affiliated with Reform Judaism, Tifereth Israel conducted worship services in the Orthodox tradition. Tifereth Israel's 1945 shift to Conservative Judaism, however, coupled with the decline of Duluth's Jewish population, led the two congregations to unite in 1969 as Temple Israel.

Minnesota's worst known encounter with smallpox came in 1924 and 1925. Five hundred people died—four hundred of them in the Twin Cities. Almost 90 percent of the Twin Cities deaths took place in Minneapolis.

Rosalie Wahl was a pioneering figure in Minnesota law during the second half of the twentieth century. She became the state's first female Supreme Court justice at a time when there were no women on the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Adas Israel Congregation was founded, in 1885, by Lithuanian immigrants, members met in a house on St. Croix Avenue in what is now the Canal Park area of Duluth. It incorporated in 1899.

The Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children operated from 1886 to 1947. The campus is one of the most intact examples of a state cottage school standing in the United States, and is significant on a national level.

On February 22, 1854, the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad completed the first rail line to connect the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. To promote that feat the company contacted notable East Coast citizens and journalists and invited them to ride their train to Rock Island. From there, the visitors took a steamboat trip up the Mississippi, stopping at St. Paul. The journalists, pleased with what they saw, wrote of the beauty and splendor of a region that many in the East thought was little more than a wilderness.

In 1910 there were over sixty orphanages and homes for the aged operated by and for African Americans in the United States. Minnesota had one of them: St. Paul's Crispus Attucks Home. The home was named for the African American patriot killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770. It served the community for six decades, beginning in 1906 during the Jim Crow era and ending in 1966 at the peak of the civil rights movement.

Bet Shalom Congregation has offered worship services affiliated with Reform Judaism since 1981. Originally based in St. Louis Park, the congregation moved to Hopkins in 1985 and to Minnetonka in 2003.