The name of Dr. William Worrall Mayo is synonymous today with high-quality, compassionate health care. Dr. Mayo and his sons, William and Charles, helped put Minnesota on the map when they founded Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

"If not fully satisfied, your money cheerfully refunded." We take statements like this for granted today, but when twenty-eight-year-old entrepreneur Joseph Ray (J. R.) Watkins of Plainview, Minnesota, put that message on a bottle of his Red Liniment, he was a trailblazer.

Fredrick Lamar McGhee (1861–1912) was Minnesota’s first African American lawyer, its most consequential early civil rights leader, the only Minnesota public figure born in slavery, a renowned orator, and a criminal defense lawyer famous for his courtroom victories. His civil rights work had national reverberations. His break with Booker T. Washington and subsequent alliance with W. E. B. DuBois led to the foundation of the Niagara Movement, and then the NAACP.