‘History’ Archives
Winston: A Woman’s Fight for Freedom in Minnesota
By the HENNEPIN HISTORY MUSEUM Dr. Lehman. Photo: Jeff Yapuncich On Saturday, October 11, the Hennepin History Museum will celebrate the opening of Winston: A Woman’s Fight for Freedom in Minnesota, an exhibit about the little-known story of Eliza Winston, the first and only enslaved person to successfully fight for their freedom in a Minnesota courtroom. Winston presents the biography of a courageous African American woman and the short time she spent in Minnesota. Her story not only sheds new light on local history, but transcends it, establishing significance within national history. De facto slavery was widely accepted in antebellum Minnesota. For years, Southern enslavers forced their captives to accompany them to the free state for business and pleasure. This ended in 1860 when Eliza Winston bravely fought for liberation. Her emancipation became local lore and national propaganda, so much so that she was largely excluded from her own narrative, one that reveals a [...]
Heart of the Beast Not Limited To a Place
By HARVEY WINJE Heart of the Beast in the community. Photo Courtesy:HOBT HOBT has occupied four locations that served as indoor workshops, classrooms, performance stages, and offices while always doing production, teaching, and performing at other indoor and outdoor places. These spaces included parks, schools, theaters, community centers, and streets throughout the Twin Cities area and suburbs. Other traveling adventures took HOBT to Washington, D.C.; New Orleans, LA; Brookings and Mitchell, SD; Itasca, MN and to the Gulf of Mexico on a Mississippi river towns tour with ”Circle of Water Circus” (currently exhibited at the Hennepin History Museum). In 2000, HOBT performed at the DMZ–Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. HOBT has been a place that welcomes everyone no matter where it’s taught, performed, or at any one of its four studio/workshop/stage locations:1973-1985: Walker Community Church 3104 16th Avenue So; demolished after May 27, 2012 fire [...]
Cedar-Riverside: A Sketch of Displacement and Resistance
By JESSIE MERRIAM, Public History student working on a mobile museum for Our Streets Minneapolis. Originally published in local punk-adjacent newsletter zine, Restless Legs Inquirer. Re-printed with permission. Cartoon of the forces shaping Cedar Riverside, for community listening sessions in May 2022. By Jessie Merriam. The wavy-crusted pie slice that is now called Cedar Riverside was once a continuous neighborhood with Seward and Phillips. Also known over the years as Riverside, Seven Corners, Bohemian Flats, Snoose Boulevard (Snus = Swedish snuff), “The Haight Ashbury of the Midwest,” and “Little Mogadishu,” Cedar Riverside has always been a place of intersections. “There were no neighborhoods before Urban Renewal–we lived in South Minneapolis! They needed clever labels. Our speech had nothing to do with neighborhoods,” reported a Seward neighborhood elder historian over coffee this January. “Block groups! That’s the basic foundation–come on now! [...]
