U.S. Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro, a bureaucrat who played a crucial role in the seizure of Native American land in the Upper Mississippi Valley in the 1830s, came to deplore the “rascality and frauds permitted by the treaty making power generally.”
Read More »Ignatius Donnelly: Paranoid progressive in the Gilded Age
A look at the progressive politics of Ignatius Donnelly, a larger-than-life Gilded Age politician who was half madman and half prophet
Read More »Politics of the Past: Minnesota’s ‘Wild Woman’ charged with impersonating a man in 1858
Joseph Lobdell suffered decades of legal persecution
Read More »Politics of the Past: Eugenie Anderson ‘held her own in smoke-filled rooms’
The Red Wing, Minnesota, native became the United States' first female ambassador in 1949.
Read More »Politics of the Past: Minnesota’s struggle for black suffrage
A protracted 1860s political battle culminated in the state enfranchising black men two years before the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment
Read More »Politics of the Past: A ‘psychopath’ goes to Washington
Francis H. Shoemaker, an amoral self-promoter, ascended to power in an era of economic and political uncertainty.
Read More »Politics of the Past: ‘Grave doubts’ couldn’t stop hanging
Ann Bilansky executed in 1860 despite shaky murder case
Read More »Politics of the Past: When Minnesota tried to stop the presses
Did Gov. Floyd Olson order a tabloid journalist murdered?
Read More »Politics of the Past: Partisan rancor marked Minnesota’s entry into Union
The state's founding was marred by a legislative caning and the spectacle of dueling constitutional conventions
Read More »Politics of the Past: The razor-thin election of 1962
Anderson-Rolvaag recount lasted 4 months
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