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July 2019
Fort Snelling at Bdote: 200 Years of History
For millennia, the place where the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi has been a crossroads, a place of strategic power. But that symbolism is complicated. This tour is a powerful reminder that most Minnesotans today are descendants of immigrants, living on conquered land. Peter DeCarlo, author of Fort Snelling at Bdote, shares the story of the power of place and its peoples. He introduces us to key people who lived in the area. Their lives demonstrate a complicated story laden…
Find out more »September 2019
Trench Warfare in Midtown Minneapolis: From Railroad to Greenway
Just over a century ago the Minneapolis City Council directed the Milwaukee Railroad Company to construct a trench and 37 bridges for roads spanning the trench (just north of Lake Street between Hennepin and Cedar Avenues). This provided a grade separation of three miles from Hennepin to Cedar Avenues between the railroad and the city's automobile and streetcar traffic. Learn about the controversies surrounding this major civil works project in the early 1900s, the trench and corridor's transitions from industry…
Find out more »October 2019
Twin Cities Hard Boiled
James Eli Shiffer, author of The King of Skid Row: John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis, will visually take us to visit the nucleus of the old Gateway at Hennepin, Nicollet, and Washington Avenues. Though office towers, upscale hotels, and condos abound here, imagine this intersection 60 years earlier where you are surrounded by seedy nightclubs, bars, and flophouses in such filthy, decaying structures that the resident vermin left scathing reviews on Yelp; by individuals sprawled on…
Find out more »November 2019
How the Ford Motor Company Transformed Minnesota over the Past 100 Years
Author and historian Brian MacMahon will discuss how the Ford Motor Company transformed Minnesota as detailed in his award-winning book, The Ford Century in Minnesota, published by the University of Minnesota Press. The impact of the company will be seen locally, including the introduction of the Model T, the building of the Twin Cities Assembly Plant, cutbacks during the Depression, World War II, women joining the workforce, dealerships on Hennepin Avenue and Lake Street, globalization, the eventual closing of the…
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