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Shaping Minnesota's Identity, 150 Years of State History | 
| Author: Steven Keillor
Publisher: Pogo Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $23.50
New (2) from $23.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 638061
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 1880654377
Dewey Decimal Number: 977
EAN: 9781880654378
ASIN: 1880654377
Publication Date: December 4, 2007
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Product Description
Shaping Minnesota's Identity illustrates the pressures and choices Minnesotans have faced in their 150-year history. State and national events have affected Minnesota's social, political, and economic paths. Minnesotans have shared the nation's prosperity and its depressions. A landscape of 15,000 lakes, prairie soils, the North Woods, and the Mesabi iron range also makes this history unique, as does an ever-changing ethnic composition. The state's history is a chaotic tapestry of diverse voices, intense political passions, divergent social forces, and distinct geographical arenas, all of which helped shape the identity of its people and the political direction of the state.
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| Customer Reviews:
Minnesota: Between Justice and Expediency August 22, 2008
The culmination of a lifetime of research and writing on Minnesota history, Steven Keillor's Shaping Minnesota's Identity is a most read for anyone interested in the history of Minnesota and the Mid West. Like many important historical works, it is written with style, passion and a certain sense of loss. Its focus on community formation, economics, politics and religion does great service to a state noted for sobriety, hard work and moralistic politics. As an insider, Keillor is at his best explaining the complex regional, ethnic, religious, economic and cultural divisions in Minnesota. His previous work on Minnesota's farmer cooperatives and rural farmer-Labor leader Hjalmar Peterson means that he knows (as Hubert Humphrey knew) that to reduce Minnesota to the Twin Cities leds to inevitable misunderstandings.
In spite of his academic training and close ties to many at the Minnesota Historical Society, Keillor is an independent scholar who has no cooperate or academic sponsorship. In a world of increased cooperate sponsorship of history, it is refreshing to read a work whose content has not been pre-approved by 3M, Dayton-Hudson, Cargill, or politically correct but subservient tenure conscious academics. In a thoughtful chapter aptly entitled " Marketplace Minnesota," Keillor writes that "public morality was narrowed to an economic size and shape."
It is replacement of a moral economy deeply rooted in personal religious beliefs by a morality disciplined by market forces that Keillor bemoans. It is this sense of loss that will make this one of the most read and discussed accounts of the Minnesota experience.
Fun to Read January 25, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This little book, no doubt intended as a textbook for Minnesota college history classes, is so much fun to read that anybody will find it amusing. It's 297 pages long but the pages are smallish, the print is largish, and the reading goes fast, with many delightful anecdotes and vignettes. I loved its description of the three-candidate election of 1998 - Republican Norm Coleman was the sort who plays squash, Democrat Skip Humphrey was the sort who prefers herbal tea to coffee, professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was the sort who talks as if he was in a bar (and won the election).
It's foreshortened - fewer pages on earlier periods, fuller treatment of recent times, with World War I in the middle of the book. It leaves out altogether the prehistoric Native Americans and the age of exploration and fur trade. I don't think it treats at all the earlier women's movement and the struggle for woman suffrage, although it is good on the Minnesota case of Roe v . Wade and the role of "Minnesota Twin" Justice Blackmun in deciding the case. It finds continuity in protest movements from the Grange through the Progressive Movement and then into the Minnesota Commission on Public Safety which persecuted German-Americans and leftists during World War I. Like many state histories it details political squabbles election by election, but it is also excellent on Minnesota's diverse ethnic and religious history from 19th-century German Catholics to the sometimes polygamous Hmong.
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