In 1922, Mabeth Hurd Paige became one of the first four women to be elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives. Before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, she was a public speaker and an advocate for women’s suffrage and helped found the Minnesota branch of the League of Women Voters. Paige also studied both art and law, and was admitted to the bar. She was involved in charity and volunteer work that she continued until her death in 1961.

Hannah Jensen Kempfer was the first woman from rural Minnesota elected to the state legislature. She brought her personal knowledge of farming, education, child welfare, business, and natural resources to the House, serving nine terms in the Minnesota legislature between 1922 and 1942.

Known as the “flapper legislator,” Myrtle Agnes Cain was a lifelong women’s rights activist and labor organizer. When she was elected to the Minnesota House in 1922, she and three other women became the state’s first female legislators.

Gordon Parks was a world-renowned photographer, musician, film director, composer, author, and social justice activist. Best known for his documentary photojournalism that explored the impact of poverty and racial discrimination on communities of color, Parks took photographs that appeared in many news and fashion publications, including Vogue and Life. He was the first African American to write, produce, and direct major motion pictures.

Wild rice is a food of great historical, spiritual, and cultural importance for Ojibwe people. After colonization disrupted their traditional food system, however, they could no longer depend on stores of wild rice for food all year round. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, this traditional staple was appropriated by white entrepreneurs and marketed as a gourmet commodity. Native and non-Native people alike began to harvest rice to sell it for cash, threatening the health of the natural stands of the crop. This lucrative market paved the way for domestication of the plant, and farmers began cultivating it in paddies in the late 1960s. In the twenty-first century, many Ojibwe and other Native people are fighting to sustain the hand-harvested wild rice tradition and to protect wild rice beds.

When the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) opened in 1915 it exhibited 450 pieces of art, most of them on loan. In the twenty-first century it is an encyclopedic art museum, boasting a collection of more than 89,000 objects that spans 20,000 years and six continents; special exhibitions on topics that have ranged from Star Wars to Martin Luther; and a presence in the community that reflects more than a century of local support for the arts.

One of the first four women elected to the Minnesota legislature in 1922, Sue Metzger Dickey Hough campaigned for gun control, strict capital punishment, and mandatory automobile insurance, among other issues. After four unsuccessful bids for re-election, Hough turned her attention to club work and other causes, including animal welfare and civic engagement.

At the end of the nineteenth century, inmates at the Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater began publishing a newsletter written and edited by fellow prisoners. For the first time in US history, inmates at a state institution created a regular periodical that was fully their own at every level of production. They used it to discuss news, share their literary and artistic works, and organize for institutional change. Called the Prison Mirror, the newsletter served as a model for similar publications produced by inmates at nearly all of Minnesota’s state hospitals, correctional facilities, and state schools.

Italian Americans erected a Christopher Columbus memorial on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol in 1931 to mark Columbus as the first white man to set foot in the Americas. Though they intended to celebrate the achievement of a fellow Italian during a time of anti-Italian bigotry, the memorial they installed promoted white supremacist myths of discovery and erased Native Americans from history. It made no comment on the atrocities committed by Columbus against Native people. Native Americans and their allies protested the memorial’s existence for decades, and in 2020, a group that included self-identified members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) tore it down.

The Mesabi Iron Range wasn’t the first iron range to be mined in Minnesota, but it has arguably been the most prolific. Since the 1890s, the Mesabi has produced iron ore that boosted the national economy, contributed to the Allied victory in World War II, and cultivated a multiethnic regional culture in northeast Minnesota.