John Sayer was a trader, a merchant, and a partner in several fur trade companies for more than thirty years. In the late 1790s, he became a partner of the North West Company and proprietor of their Fond du Lac district, supervising trade with the Ojibwe south of Lake Superior and west across what is now northern Minnesota.

Seth Eastman was a painter and soldier best known for his depictions of the everyday life of Dakota and Ojibwe people around Fort Snelling in the 1840s. He stands out among other nineteenth-century American artists—particularly those who also painted American Indian people—because of his commitment to realism. Unlike his peers, Eastman mostly avoided romanticizing the Native people with whom he lived.

Founded in 1924, the Phyllis Wheatley House was the first settlement house to serve the social service needs of African Americans in Minneapolis. In the 1930s, it became a center of African American life at a time when racial segregation divided the city.

Svenska Folkets Tidning was a successful Minneapolis-based newspaper in publication from 1881 to 1927. It provided Swedish Americans with news from around the world but especially from Sweden, the greater United States, and Minnesota, all in the Swedish language.