Janet D. Spector, who died on September 13, 2011, worked in the 1980s with Dakota people to study the history of Little Rapids, a 19th-century Dakota village site on the Minnesota River. This work led to her pioneering book What … Continue reading
Mary Black Rogers, an anthropologist and ethnohistorian from Minnesota who studied the culture and history of Ojibwe and Métis communities in Canada and the United States, died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on January 27, 2011. The daughter of Fred R. … Continue reading
Todd Mahon, Executive director of the Anoka County Historical Society, writes that he is looking for a historian to do a study of suburbanization in Anoka and Hennepin Counties in Minnesota. The work is to be funded by a a … Continue reading
Bureaucratic approaches to the study of history and culture are fundamentally authoritarian. Understanding bureaucratic knowledge-gathering and bureaucracies in general requires ethnographic knowledge, including the folk knowledge, traditions, and practices of bureaucrats, which is sometimes only retrievable through the Freedom of … Continue reading
What will happen to the endangered archival collection in the Iron Range Research Center (IRRC) on the campus of the Minnesota Discovery Center (MDC), formerly known as Ironworld Discovery Center? The fate of the archives, which opened in 1980, is … Continue reading
Henry Ford, or maybe it was Harry Truman, said that the trouble with history was that it was “one damn thing after another.” Other people say that historians are god-like because they can make history in their own image. George … Continue reading
My mother, who was a tenacious historian, used to ask, when she was involved in some particularly difficult historical research: “If I were that piece of paper where would I be?” She practiced a kind of method-historical research, in which … Continue reading