Although I never met Judge Miles Lord, when he passed on December 10, 2016, I attended his memorial service at Mount Calvary Lutheran Church in Excelsior, Minnesota. The public filled the pews, and his children and grandchildren shared anecdotes from Lord's long and accomplished life. Afterward, when everyone filed into the cafeteria for lunch, admirers … Continue reading Read my review of “Miles Lord” (2017) in Minnesota History Magazine
On March 30, 2017, I had the great honor and fortune of moderating one of the few 2017 DFL Minneapolis mayoral candidate forums. When my fellow Law Democrats gave me this responsibility, I took it very seriously. Because this was my first time moderating a political forum, I spent weeks revising my opening remarks, researching the candidates, and thinking about how to distinguish our forum from what I derisively call "soft ball." If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it right, and I'm going to make it count.
In 1993 Minnesota became the eighth state in the nation to outlaw gay and lesbian discrimination in housing, education, and employment. Unlike other states, Minnesota even went further to ensure these same protections extended to members of the trans* community. No easy feat, this was the culmination of two decades of legislative maneuvering and grassroots … Continue reading Senator Allan Spear and the Minnesota Human Rights Act
On October 30, 2015, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro participated in a Minneapolis forum on affordable housing. With nothing better to do on a Friday morning, I picked up a notebook and decided to play journalist. Enjoy. I first saw Julian Castro as the nation did, the keynote speaker of the … Continue reading Welcome to the Promise Zone: Secretary Julian Castro Visits Minneapolis
As part of a project I'm doing on the state of contemporary writing, author Mik Everett mailed me a copy of her book Self Published Kindling: Memoirs of a Homeless Bookstore Owner (2013). After reading it, I'm excited for what our generation has to offer the literary world. As Everett so clearly illustrates: we're one of dreamers and as we set out, so much of what we have to say will be about how we maintained this spirit while navigating the world given to us by our parents. (And if you've paid any attention to the news at all, it's not a great one). Written while living out of a broken-down RV in a Wal-Mart parking lot, Self Published Kindling is about Everett's experience running a Longmont, Colorado, bookstore that stocked exclusively self-published and regional books. Though the first store of its kind in the nation, Everett quickly discovers that few writers read and even fewer readers want books you can't find in a Barnes and Noble. She tries to mitigate this through author readings and art crawls, but everyone who comes in leaves empty-handed. Soon she and her partner, John, conclude, "Everybody's just here to pretend they support art" (48). If you're an artist who's ever tried to sell their work, you know exactly what that means.
On April 15, 1865, lying in a boarding house across the street from Ford's Theater, President Abraham Lincoln died, the victim of an assassin's bullet. What was a week celebrating an end to four years of bloodshed was capstoned by one last tragedy. Though not everyone felt the same way, tens of millions mourned their fallen hero, and in Minnesota as well as elsewhere, this sorrow turned into disbelief, into anger.
In an article titled "Can Neuroscience Challenge Roe v. Wade?" William Egginton, professor in the Humanities at John Hopkins University, cautions us to be careful in how we use the natural sciences to shape public policy. In this case, abortion rights. Egginton writes about attorney Rick Hearn's suits against Idaho's Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act "and others like it that cite neuroscientific findings of pain sentience on the part of fetuses as a basis for prohibiting abortions even prior to viability." The reason for this is because Hearn believes that the government is using results from the natural sciences "as a basis for expanding or contracting the rights of its citizens." The logic goes like this: if it can be proven that fetuses are capable of pain then they are conscious and thus a person deserving of their full rights under the constitution. This clearly has political overtones. ...
A century ago, in 1914, war erupted across Europe following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a conflict that by its end claimed 37 million casualties worldwide. It was four years of fighting that closed the 19th century and set the 20th into motion. Because its worst horrors remained to be seen (Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce et Decorum est" captures the disillusion well), there was still hope it'd come to a speedy end. Although this small sample is not representative of every published illustration, political cartoon, and comic, it still provides some insight into the nation's feelings of that decisive year. Here we see doubt over the merits of sustaining a standing army (this being 15 years after the Spanish-American War and the nation's first foray into imperialism). We see as well both doubt and optimism for war -- and finally hope for 1915.
This is a follow-up to a previous article called, "Digital Humanities: Newspaper Mentions of Four MN Governors" and this short note on John Lind serves two purposes. The first is practical, the other political. (And yes, all history is political). First, there are few easily-accessible resources discussing Lind's politics. [...] Second, as Orwell said, "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." Having served on a Texas textbook review panel, I've seen firsthand historical revisionism. I've seen Tea Party rhetoric creep into how we write about the past: The framing that government has always been an unnecessary evil, taxes an infringement upon liberty. Yet, when it comes to workers and women's rights, public education, the social safety net -- all the things that allow people to live with dignity -- these were not gifts of the free market or God but rather the product of struggle. These came from grassroots organizing. These came from rising up against power. It came from the notion that a government of the people could be proactive and a force for good. Minnesota is full of such stories, and it's about time we've heard them.
As I've written elsewhere, given my time at the Initiative, I've developed an interest in Big Data analysis and how this methodology can be applied to history ("the digital humanities"). Specifically, as collections become digitized, the sheer volume of resources ought to inspire historians to find new ways to engage and manage information. While the result will only be as good as the analysis, it has the potential to reveal trends that otherwise may be implied but not obvious. The following tracks the state newspaper mentions of particular keywords -- in this case, names -- of four Minnesota governors: David M. Clough, John Lind, Samuel R. Van Sant, and John A. Johnson. For example, every instance in which "John" and "Lind" appear within five words of one another on a Minnesota newspaper page, that page is counted. Searching for variations of how these individuals were addressed (such as "Governor Van Sant" rather than "Samuel Van Sant" or "S.R. Van Sant") yield different counts but the overall trends are the same.
Joshua Panduro Preston 