The North Star State: A Minnesota History Reader

One hundred fifty years of Minnesota history spring to life in this lively and captivating collection of essays. The North Star State encompasses the wide range of Minnesota's unique past -- from the Civil War to the World Wars, from frontier life to the age of technological innovation, from Dakota and Ojibwe history to the story of St. Paul's black sleeping-car porters, from lumber workers and truckers' strikes to the women's suffrage movement. In addition to investigative articles by the state's top historians, editor Anne Aby has assembled captivating first-person accounts from key moments in Minnesota history, including George Nelson's reminiscences of his years in the early nineteenth-century fur trade; the diary of Emily Goodridge Grey, an early African American settler; and Jasper N. Searles's letters home from the Battle of First Bull Run. From the quintessential to the quirky, from the panoramic to the particular, these essays tell a fascinating history of our state.Culled from the best of the award-winning Minnesota History magazine, the essays in The North Star State are arranged in sections that focus on a particular aspect of life and culture, including race and ethnicity, politics and law, industry, war, labor, education, and other areas of inquiry central to understanding our state's unique history. These engaging sections invite readers to dip into topics of interest or read from cover to cover. Every article is thoroughly annotated and indexed, and a timeline quickly places the major events of the book into their proper context. Equally ideal as a gift or as a classroom companion, The North Star State is excellent as an introduction to the state's history or as acompendium for the serious scholar.