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Walk a Century in My Shoes: Minnesota 1900–2000 Annette Atkins On the eve of the twenty-first century,many historians grappled with ways of demonstrating the awe-inspiring technological advances of the previous one hundred years—the age of the automobile,the airplane,radio ,television,nuclearweapons,computers,and the internet.Annette Atkins chose something more personal to examine: her feet.Or,more accurately,her shoes.How did her shoe collection,she wondered,diJer from those of women in Minnesota at the turn of the twentieth century? Beginning with the three pairs of locally made shoes owned by Sarah Christie Stevens in 1900,Atkins follows changes in production,marketing ,and sales of shoes.In so doing,she explores the twentieth century’s impact on consumer attitudes and,in turn,reveals a bit about our shifting values and lifestyles. My favorite shoes are flat,black tie shoes that remind me of Sister Francita,my seventh-grade teacher, and of Katherine Hepburn, my other fashion idol. My friends tease me because these shoes are so dowdy, but they’re comfortable. They don’t pinch my toes or slide oJ when I walk down stairs. I can run if I have to, and my feet stay dry. Most importantly, they’re “me.” I wonder what Sarah Jane Christie Stevens would have thought of them. Sarah and her husband,William,farmed near the village of Good Thunder, 14 miles from Mankato,on the Chicago,Milwaukee,and St.Paul Railway line. In 1900 she was 56 years old and had lived in the state for the better part of three decades.Like a third of the population,she was foreign born,though not German or Scandinavian like a majority of Minnesota’s immigrants,but Scottish by way of Ireland. Her father was a Scottish weaver working in Ireland when she was born in 1844 to her Scots-Irish mother.The next year the family emigrated to Wisconsin.With her father, stepmother, half brother, and three brothers Sarah moved on to Minnesota in the mid-1860s and lived there until her death in 1919. By the year 1900 she had been married for about 20 years and had four stepchildren, two daughters of her own, and a husband she 433 clearly loved, even if she did call him Mr. Stevens to outsiders, including her brothers.He was 19 years older than she.1 Sarah faced the twentieth century full of memories of her own and Minnesota ’s past.She had witnessed the Civil War,the coming of the railroads,the rise of populism, and the creation of White Earth Reservation, as well as the recently concluded Spanish-American War. She watched the coming of the telephone, the bicycle, and the automobile, though she owned none of them, and a modern improvement most important to her: rural free delivery of the mail.She campaigned for prohibition of alcohol and suJrage forwomen.Minnesota granted women the vote on school-related matters in 1875, paving the way for Sarah’s election as Blue Earth County’s superintendent of schools in the 1890s.Although she died before Minnesota ratified the woman-suJrage amendment,she did live to see Prohibition.World War I,too.Her pantheon of famous Minnesotans would have included Ignatius Donnelly,Henry H.Sibley, Alexander Ramsey,Little Crow,and Archbishop John Ireland.John Lind,born in Sweden,was governor in 1900 but was defeated that November by Samuel R.Van Sant,a Civil Warveteran.Knute Nelson from Norway,Minnesota’s first foreign-born governor,and Cushman Kellogg Davis,another former governor, were her senators. Sarah’s village, Good Thunder, was named after a Dakota man who had converted to Episcopal Bishop HenryWhipple’s Christianity and who,having aided whites during the Dakota War,was known to them as a “good Indian.” She would not have had much contact with the Dakota,however,most of them having been removed to Nebraska in the 1860s. She would not have known many African Americans either.Of the state’s 1.7 million residents, they comprised just under 5,000.About half lived in St. Paul. She might, though, have had contact with J. R.Wysong, one of only 200 Chinese in the state; he operated a steam laundry in Mankato.2 Sarah agonized over the safety of her brother, Sandy,who had joined the gold rush to Alaska in 1898 and hadn’t yet returned in 1900.She regularly corresponded with her brother Tom, a Congregational minister, and his wife...

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