Last year the Minnesota Historical Society awarded me a 2017 Legacy Research Fellowship. This supported a project I am doing on how early-20th century nurses organized what later became the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA). For those unfamiliar with the MNA, not only is it a major political force, but it is responsible for both elevating the profession and improving the quality of care for hundreds of thousands of patients.
In June 2016, I attended the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML). There I read my fiction and presented on “The Space and Place of Western Minnesota Writers.” Since I had just been accepted into law school, throughout the conference I kept drifting to the question of how I could combine my passion for literature with my interest in law. (Though, of course, as every good lawyer knows, good legal writing is also good creative writing). Then an idea came to me: I could study judicial references to dystopian literature.
I’ve posted before about the Great War, including the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and a sampling of political cartoons from the war's first year. Recently, while searching the newspaper archives for (and failing to find) a certain Russian-Anarchist-themed comic strip, I discovered the following photograph. Titled WAR, it depicts a Belgian woman—grief-stricken, the features of her face lost in dark shadows. It's amazing what one uncovers in archives. What begins with the discovery of a single photograph unravels into a politics, a profession, an entire life. As the poet Anne Waldman once told me, "archive is memory," and WAR reminds us how many war photographers have made this same refrain: "If HER face does not stop war, not all the sights of [Europe, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan] would stop war."
“Only the first ten years matter,” a Minnesota State Prison inmate told John Carter, and "[w]hether or not the first ten years are all that matter, there is no doubt that the first six months are by no means six little drops of time.” It was 1905 and as the 19-year-old Carter listened, he settled … Continue reading John Carter of Minnesota: The “Convict Poet” Who Won His Freedom
Studying America in England While going through the University of Minnesota's online archives, I came across an article called "Studying America in England" from The Minnesota Alumni Weekly (December 12, 1931). Written by a fresh alumna named Mildred Boie (class of '27), in it she talks of her trip to Cambridge to study English literature. Specifically, she … Continue reading “I have never been there, but I have read Babbitt — and the villages are all Main Streetish, aren’t they?”
Joshua Panduro Preston 