front cover of Barrios Norteños
Barrios Norteños
St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century
By Dionicio Nodín Valdés
University of Texas Press, 2000

Mexican communities in the Midwestern United States have a history that extends back to the turn of the twentieth century, when a demand for workers in several mass industries brought Mexican agricultural laborers to jobs and homes in the cities. This book offers a comprehensive social, labor, and cultural history of these workers and their descendants, using the Mexican barrio of "San Pablo" (St. Paul) Minnesota as a window on the region.

Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews, Dennis Valdés explores how Mexicans created ethnic spaces in Midwestern cities and how their lives and communities have changed over the course of the twentieth century. He examines the process of community building before World War II, the assimilation of Mexicans into the industrial working class after the war, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent changes resulting from industrial restructuring and unprecedented migration and population growth. Throughout, Valdés pays particular attention to Midwestern Mexicans' experiences of inequality and struggles against domination and compares them to Mexicans' experiences in other regions of the U.S.

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Modern Bonds
Redefining Community in Early Twentieth-Century St. Paul
Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

What does community mean, exactly? In this interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello takes seriously the concept of community as an object of historical analysis.

Focusing on St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1900 to 1920, Modern Bonds explores the diverse ways that its people renegotiated private and public affiliations during a period of modernization. The book examines a wide range of subjects and materials, including photographs from an African American family, fictional depictions of middle-class women, built environments that created enclaves of immigrants, and public festivals designed to unite all citizens. As Duclos-Orsello demonstrates, it was in this period that a complex set of activities, policies, and practices led to new understandings of community that continue to shape life today.

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front cover of Modern Bonds
Modern Bonds
Redefining Community in Early Twentieth-Century St. Paul
Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

What does community mean, exactly? In this interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello takes seriously the concept of community as an object of historical analysis.

Focusing on St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1900 to 1920, Modern Bonds explores the diverse ways that its people renegotiated private and public affiliations during a period of modernization. The book examines a wide range of subjects and materials, including photographs from an African American family, fictional depictions of middle-class women, built environments that created enclaves of immigrants, and public festivals designed to unite all citizens. As Duclos-Orsello demonstrates, it was in this period that a complex set of activities, policies, and practices led to new understandings of community that continue to shape life today.

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Rafferty's Last Case
A Minnesota Mystery featuring Sherlock Holmes
Larry Millett
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

The ninth and final Minnesota mystery, in which Shadwell Rafferty, with the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, may have solved his own murder​

 

Like many mysteries, this one begins with a murder. But in this case the victim happens to be the detective, on the verge of revealing the culprit in an earlier crime. Had Shadwell Rafferty identified his own murderer? When news of Rafferty’s death reaches Sherlock Holmes, in Chicago on the last leg of an American speaking tour, the world’s most famous detective and his redoubtable companion Watson rush to Minnesota to hunt for their friend’s killer.

 

Set amid the glittering society and sordid underworld of 1928 St. Paul, Larry Millett’s ninth and final Shadwell Rafferty mystery takes readers through the serpentine twists of Rafferty’s fatal investigation, even as Holmes, following in Rafferty’s tracks, may be closing in on the answer to both cases. This ingenious double mystery takes us to every corner of St. Paul, from the city’s most notorious speakeasy to a home for unwed mothers to the mansions of Summit Avenue, and at every turn we find another suspect: an ambitious mayor and his devoted fixer-in-chief, a heartless blackmailer and a police detective mired in city hall connections, a poet-turned-mystery writer with a suspicious coterie, and a priest hiding a terrible secret.

 

A mysterious woman in Minneapolis who makes certain illicit arrangements and a young man in possession of incriminating documents provide Holmes with vital clues that lead to a final confrontation with an exceptionally devious murderer worthy of the exceptionally devious plot that brings the Minnesota mystery series to a fitting and powerful conclusion.

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front cover of Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders
Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders
Larry Millett
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
The year is 1896, and St. Paul’s magnificent Winter Carnival is under way when Holmes and Watson are summoned by the city’s most powerful man, railroad magnate James J. Hill. A wealthy young man disappears on the eve of his wedding—and his fiancée suspiciously discards her wedding dress. After a grisly discovery in the carnival’s Ice Palace leads to a flurry of clues, Holmes is on the case. His pursuit of the murderer takes him through the highest echelons of St. Paul society and into cahoots with Shadwell Rafferty, a gregarious saloonkeeper and part-time private investigator. Soon Holmes, Watson, and Rafferty are embroiled in a perilous adventure that takes them from one frozen corner of the city to another and out onto the treacherous ice of the Mississippi River as they trail a cruel and ruthless killer.
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Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus
Immigrant Incorporation in New Destinations
Stephanie Chambers
Temple University Press, 2017

In the early 1990s, Somali refugees arrived in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Later in the decade, an additional influx of immigrants arrived in a second destination of Columbus, Ohio. These refugees found low-skill jobs in warehouses and food processing plants and struggled as social “outsiders,” often facing discrimination based on their religious traditions, dress, and misconceptions that they are terrorists. The immigrant youth also lacked access to quality educational opportunities.

In Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus, Stefanie Chambers provides a cogent analysis of these refugees in Midwestern cities where new immigrant communities are growing. Her comparative study uses qualitative and quantitative data to assess the political, economic, and social variations between these urban areas. Chambers examines how culture and history influenced the incorporation of Somali immigrants in the U.S., and recommends policy changes that can advance rather than impede incorporation. 

Her robust investigation provides a better understanding of the reasons these refugees establish roots in these areas, as well as how these resettled immigrants struggle to thrive.

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front cover of Subterranean Twin Cities
Subterranean Twin Cities
Greg Brick
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Subterranean Twin Cities is a treasure—a book for the Tom Sawyer in all of us. Greg Brick is one of those few persons with the unique talent to write expertly about his adventures, bringing readers along with him on hands and knees.” —Steve Thayer, author of Saint Mudd and The Weatherman.

We tend to send things underground that we are not interested in ever seeing again. Sewage. Garbage. In the past, we have used the underground to age such provisions as cheese and beer. In Subterranean Twin Cities, geologist, historian, and urban speleologist Greg Brick takes us on an adventurous, educational, and—thankfully—sanitary tour beneath the streets and into the myriad tunnels, caves, and industrial spaces that make up the Twin Cities’ fascinating and surprisingly vast underground landscape.

In this groundbreaking tour, the first of its kind of the Twin Cities, Brick mines the stories that lie below the city surface. Beginning with an accessible history on the geology of the area—including the giant cone-shaped mollusk Endoceras, whose thirteen-foot-long fossils are found in the Mississippi gorge—Brick guides us into a series of astounding firsthand expeditions. We follow him into St. Paul’s historic Carver’s Cave, with its stories of sunken treasure; through the many caves constructed for brewing, cheese ripening, and mushroom farming; and into the world of nineteenth-century show caves for tourists. We even find ourselves in the “Shangri-la” of urban caves: the extensive Schiek’s Cave seventy-five feet beneath the busy streets of downtown Minneapolis.

From spending the onset of Y2K in Carver’s Cave (just in case) to long hours wading in underground rivers, Brick proves himself a knowledgeable, wry, and daring guide. Subterranean Twin Cities shines a headlamp (with extra batteries, of course) into the captivating labyrinths beneath the Twin Cities and reminds us that what we see aboveground is really only half of the story.
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Swede Hollow
Ola Larsmo
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

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The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance
Kenneth J. Saltman
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

How “innovative” finance schemes skim public wealth while hijacking public governance

Charter school expansion. Vouchers. Scholarship tax credit programs. The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance offers a new social theory to explain why these and other privatization policies and programs win support despite being unsupported by empirical evidence. Kenneth J. Saltman details how, under the guise of innovation, cost savings, and corporate social responsibility, new and massive neoliberal educational privatization schemes have been widely adopted in the United States. From a trillion-dollar charter school bubble to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to celebrities branding private schools, Saltman ultimately connects such schemes to the country’s current crisis of truth and offers advice for resistance.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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