Univ Of Minnesota Press imprint: 799 books

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The northern pike—sometimes affectionately known as the “aquatic wolf”—is one of the most sought after and mythologized fishes in Minnesota, but until now there have been few books devoted to the history and ecological management of the species. Based on pioneering research carried out in Minnesota...

Was Caesar like the eagle because of his aquiline (from aquila, for “eagle” in Latin) nose, or does the eagle seem imperial because of his Caesar-like beak? Does the sharp vision of a “hawk-eyed” observer have any basis in nature? And what the heck is “kettling” to a bird-watcher, or,...