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Wooden sign denoting the Upper Sioux historic site

Tribe Getting Piece of Minnesota Back More Than a Century After Ancestors Died There

Golden prairies of a Minnesota state park also hold the burial sites of Dakota people who died as the U.S. failed to fulfill treaties with Native Americans.
Map of Iowa and a drawing of a factory processing corn.

Searching for the Spirit of the Midwest

Was the nineteenth-century Midwest “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen”?
‘The Proposed Emigrant Dumping Site’; cartoon by Victor Gillam from Judge magazine, March 22, 1890

Whose Freedom?

On the ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

What Tecumseh Fought For

Pursuing a Native alliance powerful enough to resist the American invaders, the Shawnee leader and his prophet brother envisioned a new and better Indian world.
Drawing of headshots of Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson

"Where Two Waters Come Together"

The confluence of Black and Indigenous history at Bdote.
The signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux depicted by painter Francis David Millet in 1885.

Dakota Uprooted: Capitalism, Resilience, and the U.S.-Dakota War

White American empire transformed Minnesota into an agricultural and extraction-based economy that uprooted Dakota from their traditional homelands.
An 1863 illustration from “Le Monde illustré” of formerly enslaved people celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation.

What If Reconstruction Didn’t End Till 1920?

Historian Manisha Sinha argues that the Second Republic lasted decades longer than most histories state and achieved wider gains.
Sign reading "Welcome to the People's University for Palestine" at Harvard protest encampment

The Real Scandal of Campus Protest

It’s not that there has been too much student protest. It’s that there has not been much, much more of it.
A historical marker outside Fendall Hall, a plantation.

Historical Markers Are Everywhere In America. Some Get History Wrong.

The nation's historical markers delight, distort and, sometimes, just get the story wrong.
Oil pumpjack in the rural southwest.

Public Universities Are Profiting In Billions From Industries On Stolen Indigenous Land

Extractive industries filling public university coffers on stolen land. Here's how 14 land-grant colleges took 8.2 million acres from 123 Indigenous nations.
Photo of the Hermann the German Monument in New Ulm, Minnesota

Hermann the German: Settler Colonial Inscription in Minnesota

What does Hermann’s watchful position over New Ulm—stolen Dakota homelands— reveal about settler colonialism and the geography of memory?
A 1613 engraving of the July 1609 battle between Samuel de Champlain, his men, their Native allies, and Mohawk soldiers.

The Rediscovery of America: Why Native History is American History

Historian Ned Blackhawk’s new book stresses the importance of telling US history with a wider and more inclusive lens.
Glacier National Park, in Montana, as seen from the Blackfeet Reservation, near Duck Lake.

Return the National Parks to the Tribes

The national parks are the closest thing America has to sacred lands, and like the frontier of old, they can help forge our democracy anew.

The Legend of Big Ole

How one monument came to be at the center of Minnesota’s imagined white past.
Laura Ingalls Wilder

Librarians without Chests: A Response to the ALSC’s Denigration of Laura Ingalls Wilder

A network of professional librarians seeks to destroy a beloved literary heroine and malign her creator.
A drawing of a hippopotamus with its mouth open wide.

American Hippopotamus

A bracing and eccentric epic of espionage and hippos.

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