University Of Minnesota Press: 838 books
Citizen Swain
Tales from a Minnesota Life
Language: English
Release Date: April 8, 2015
For an insider’s take on the last eighty years in Minnesota history, sit down with Tom H. Swain’s memoir. It is a personal look at the people and events that shaped the state’s history, written by a civic and business leader—and a true public servant—with a genuine knack for telling a story....
Crossing the Barriers
The Autobiography of Allan H. Spear
Language: English
Release Date: October 29, 2010
Allan Spear had a long and distinguished career as a historian and as a Minnesota state senator. Perhaps best known for coming out as openly gay during his first term in the Minnesota Senate-becoming one of the first elected officials in the nation to do so-Spear was also a leader of Eugene McCarthy's...
Land of 10,000 Loves
A History of Queer Minnesota
Language: English
Release Date: September 21, 2012
For too long, LGBTQ communities—including Minnesota’s—have been maligned, misrepresented, and often outright ignored. Myths regarding the queer experience have grown and become embedded in local and national consciousness. The absence of queer stories over time in local historical and popular writing...
Lost Minnesota
Stories of Vanished Places
Language: English
Release Date: August 14, 2000
Believe it or not, Minnesota’s architectural landscape has included a house made from the fuselage of a B-29 bomber, a hotel that spent its final years as a chicken hatchery, a Civil War cemetery, a treehouse built and occupied year-round by an eccentric university professor, and a railway that once...
The Wedding Heard 'Round the World
America's First Gay Marriage
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2016
On September 3, 1971, Michael McConnell and Jack Baker exchanged vows in the first legal same-sex wedding in the United States. Their remarkable story is told here for the first time—a unique account of the passion and energy of the gay liberation movement in the sixties and seventies. At the...
A Love Affair with Birds
The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2013
Imagine a Minneapolis so small that, on calm days, the roar of St. Anthony Falls could be heard in town, a time when passenger pigeons roosted in neighborhood oak trees. Now picture a dapper professor conducting his ornithology class (the university’s first) by streetcar to Lake Harriet for a morning...
by
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2016
With his background as a community organizer and as a state legislator representing Chicago’s South Side, Barack Obama became America’s most “urban” president since Teddy Roosevelt. But what has been his record in dealing with the issues most impacting our metropolitan areas today? Looking...
Iron and Water
My Life Protecting Minnesota's Environment
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2018
A memoir of family, mining pioneers and unscrupulous magnates, and the fight for Minnesota’s natural resources
In 1855 the Merritt family arrived in Minnesota, where a descendant, Alfred, would one day become one of the “Seven Iron Men”—builders of the first mines to tap the state’s...
Everybody's Heard about the Bird
The True Story of 1960s Rock 'n' Roll in Minnesota
Language: English
Release Date: November 7, 2015
If you didn’t experience rock and roll in Minnesota in the 1960s, this book will make you wish you had. This behind-the-scenes, up-close-and-personal account relates how a handful of Minnesota rock bands erupted out of a small Midwest market and made it big. It was a brief, heady moment for the...
North Country
The Making of Minnesota
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2010
In 1862, four years after Minnesota was ratified as the thirty-second state in the Union, simmering tensions between indigenous Dakota and white settlers culminated in the violent, six-week-long U.S.–Dakota War. Hundreds of lives were lost on both sides, and the war ended with the execution of thirty-eight...
Digital State
The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2013
Accounts of the early events of the computing industry—the Turing machine, the massive Colossus, the ENIAC computer—are well-told tales, and equally well known is the later emergence of Silicon Valley and the rise of the personal computer. Yet there is an extraordinary untold middle history—with...
The Crusade for Forgotten Souls
Reforming Minnesota's Mental Institutions, 1946–1954
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2018
The stirring story of the reform movement that laid the groundwork for a modern mental health system in Minnesota
In 1940 Engla Schey, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, took a job as a low-paid attendant at Anoka State Hospital, one of Minnesota’s seven asylums. She would work among people...
Sky Blue Water
Great Stories for Young Readers
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2016
From the Dakota people who first inhabited the state to its generations of immigrants and today’s residents, Minnesota has long had a vibrant and unique storytelling tradition. A rich and often under appreciated part of this tradition is youth storytelling—a movement of which Minnesota is a national...
Flames of Discontent
The 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike
Language: English
Release Date: December 20, 2017
On June 2, 1916, forty mostly immigrant mineworkers at the St. James Mine in Aurora, Minnesota, walked off the job. This seemingly small labor disturbance would mushroom into one of the region’s, if not the nation’s, most contentious and significant battles between organized labor and management...