Located near the community of Embarrass, Matt and Kaisa Hill’s farmstead was one of a collection of rural properties in central St. Louis County that exemplified Finnish immigrants’ imprint on the cultural landscape of northern Minnesota in the early 1900s.

The lace-making school that operated at Birch Coulee at the turn of the twentieth century is an important part of the history of the Lower Sioux Indian Community. Although the school was an extension of the assimilation efforts directed towards Dakota people in the late 1800s, the Birch Coulee lace-makers used the project to support their community, and to continue a long tradition of communal artmaking among Dakota women.

The original Great Seal of Minnesota was created by men who tied their fortunes to the progress (as they defined it) and settlement of the state, often at the expense of Native Americans. Starting in the late 1960s, critics of the seal argued that its imagery reflected an anti-Native American bias. In 2023, a State Emblems Redesign Commission chose a new design for the seal intended to better represent twenty-first-century Minnesota.

For women to earn wage income in the 1800s, they first had to overcome the conventional, and often legal, strictures that led to the saying, “a woman’s place is in the home.” In the early twentieth century, technological and economic change—as well as two world wars—transformed the industrial workplace, and much of daily life. In Minnesota and throughout the US, the women’s suffrage movement overlapped with these changes and helped the campaign for economic and social equality, including the right to work.

What good is a state flag? According to flag expert Lee Herold of Rochester, Minnesota, a good flag creates a distinctive brand. Ideally, Minnesota’s flag should also create unity, representing our state’s values everywhere it flies. But this has not always been the case. The people of Minnesota have altered their state flag’s design in the past to meet changing needs. They continued to do so in 2023, when public input informed a redesign commission’s choice for a new flag.

William Little Wolf left his home on Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation as a child to attend a series of boarding schools. In 1917, he ran away from Carlisle Indian Industrial School in order to join the Navy and fight for the United States in World War I. He earned praise for his service as a gunner on the USS Utah and returned in 1919 to live out the rest of his life in Minnesota.

The Nonpartisan League nominated Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. as its candidate to challenge Governor Joseph A. A. Burnquist in the June 1918 Republican primary. Although Burnquist prevailed and went on to win the general election in November, the bitter, often violent campaign transformed Minnesota politics.

For more than a century, the routes now known as US Highway 61 and Minnesota State Highway 61 have captured the imagination of Minnesotans looking for views of rushing rivers and cascading waterfalls. Although the road has been renamed, reconfigured, and interrupted multiple times, it continues to serve as a vital transportation channel along the state’s eastern corridor.

Harris Martin, also known as George Harris, was a middleweight boxer who went by the moniker “the Black Pearl.” In 1887 he became the first Colored Middleweight Champion of the World in a fight staged on the banks of the Mississippi, making him one of the most famous boxers of the period.

Marine Mill, the first commercial sawmill in Minnesota, operated in Marine Mills (Marine on St. Croix) along the banks of the St. Croix River from 1839 to 1895. Over a period of about six decades, the mill produced millions of board feet of lumber and provided construction material used in towns and cities throughout the state. The remaining ruins were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and opened to the public as a park and historic site two years later. The Marine on St. Croix Historic District, created in 1974, includes the mill’s remains.