State We're In: Reflections on Minnesota History

Welcome to Minnesota: The State We're In

3 anneTTe aTkInS s Welcome to Minnesota The State We’re In In 1958, Minnesota’s hundredth anniversary of admission to the Union, the state pulled out all the stops to celebrate. The Statehood Centennial Commission had worked for more than two years to get Minnesotans primed and excited about the centennial. Efforts included producing a short film, Everybody Ready? Let’s Go, and organizing the Women’s Committee,local and county committees,and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Among the notable centennial accomplishments were the Centennial Train, which visited every county except Cook (no railroad tracks); commemorative medals, ashtrays, posters, pins; the Miss Centennial pageant; and a new centennial song and record album.The state underwrote publication of the Gopher Reader (a Minnesota history magazine for kids),as well as a centennial cookbook and books about Minnesota’s artists and writers. The state also subsidized local events, exhibits and competitions at county fairs and at the State Fair, and the installation in the U.S. Capitol of two busts—one of Minnesota’s 1930s Governor Floyd B.Olson and the other of educator Maria Sanford. Entertainer Judy Garland headlined Statehood Week. A bit belatedly (in 1963), the University of Minnesota Press published Theodore Blegen’s Minnesota: A History, the most important new state history since William Watts Folwell’s four-volume A History of Minnesota, published in the 1910s and 1920s.1 Minnesotans celebrated the centennial not just from the top down. They visited the touring train; bought the medallions; put together their own local picnics, parades, and pageants; and published their own community cookbooks and church histories. Twenty-five years later, in 1983, the state’s birthday came and went without much notice,signaling not so much party fatigue as a changed 4 u aTkInS historical landscape.In the decades since the centennial,the civil rights movement gained significant momentum; the American Indian Movement (aim) was founded in Minneapolis in 1968; and two important books found wide popular and scholarly readership: John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (1961) and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). South Dakota’s Second Battle of Wounded Knee in 1973 taught many people about the first battle in 1890. In short, the Native American perspective on American and state history, nearly invisible to most Minnesotans in 1958, was blazingly, sharply evident.2 In the intervening years, the historical profession—like the rest of American society—had changed dramatically. Historians had both been shaped by the new movements and contributed to them, so that our judgment about what was worth studying had expanded radically. Our work came to be full of “new” history—new social history, new labor, new economic, new intellectual, new, new, new. We redefined what and who we ought to study and know. We took to studying different perspectives: the American Revolution from the view of women, slavery from the view of the slaves, economic structures from the view of laborers. More than that, historians—more of us women, minorities , and working class—traded in our earlier role as patriotic cheerleaders to become critics. We abandoned the all-is-progress narrative approach to the past and concentrated on its shadow side: the long specter of slavery and racism, Japanese internment camps, the toll that American empire has taken and inflicted, the inequalities imposed by class,gender,and sexual preference,and—perhaps most important for state history—the dispossession and subjection of Native Americans. For historians of the United States, these decades proved to be an intellectually expansive, sprawling, and fertile time. The field of state history, however, lost its way. While many states continue to require that students study their home history—in Minnesota it is part of the sixth-grade curriculum—and while many primary and secondary schoolteachers in training take the subject in college, few historians any longer claim to be state historians, even if they do teach the subject. Those who do teach it no longer share a common understanding of what state history is.As the state crept up on its 150th WelcoMe To MInneSoTa u 5 birthday to be marked in 2008,historians,then,wondered and worried even about what kind of observance the state would launch. Even without the historians’ concerns, the state’s economic situation in the early 2000s guaranteed that the commemoration would be a low-key event. In those years, substantial cuts in state funding hit...