Minnesota Rag takes the reader on a tour of the underside of a dark period in Minnesota's past, one filled with crooked public officials, vengeful gangsters, and yellow journalists. Featuring notorious characters such as Jay M. Near, racist and antilabor publisher of Minneapolis's Saturday Press, pioneering newsman Fred W. Friendly weaves the tale of a court case that molded our understanding of freedom of the press and set a precedent for the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

Vol. 6 includes the 23d Biennial report of the Society, 1923/24, as an extra number.

A fabulous showcase of individuals, events, and inventions that have made Minnesota.

With the warmth and humor we've come to know, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion shares his own remarkable story. In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures. PHC lasted forty-two years, 1,557 shows, and enjoyed the freedom to do as it pleased for three or four million listeners every Saturday at 5 p.m. Central. He got to sing with Emmylou Harris and Renée Fleming and once sang two songs to the U.S. Supreme Court. He played a private eye and a cowboy, gave the news from his hometown, Lake Wobegon, and met Somali cabdrivers who’d learned English from listening to the show. He wrote bestselling novels, won a Grammy and a National Humanities Medal, and made a movie with Robert Altman with an alarming amount of improvisation. He says, “I was unemployable and managed to invent work for myself that I loved all my life, and on top of that I married well. That’s the secret, work and love. And I chose the right ancestors, impoverished Scots and Yorkshire farmers, good workers. I’m heading for eighty, and I still get up to write before dawn every day.”

“Karlen offers a colorful and impressively researched account of the Minneapolis underworld and his fascinating relative that feels right out of Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls.” Star Tribune “Deliciously snappy.” American Jewish World “Karlen brings back the days when Peggy Lee walked into Augie’s straight off the bus from North Dakota, when mid-century celebrities like Frank Sinatra visited Hennepin Avenue, and when the most powerful crime lords in the land checked their guns at the door when they visited Augie’s.” MinnPost “Augie’s Secrets is filled with stunning, stylish prose that captures the flavor of the Jewish underworld of downtown Minneapolis down to its last rubout and pastrami sandwich.” Paul Maccabee, author of John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920–1936

From his assumption of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot's editorial helm in 1919 until his death in 1950, Louis Isaac Jaffé served as one of the South's leading and most respected liberal journalists. Prejudice he faced as a Jew created in him an abiding empathy with the downtrodden, and his World War I military service and subsequent Red Cross work deepened his sensitivity to injustice. Alexander Leidholdt's new biography maps the battlefield of intolerance and civil rights violations on which Jaffé fired his journalistic salvos and explores the complexities of a man who was poised to become a national spokesman for a better South. Jaffé worked ceaselessly to advance racial understanding, successfully lobbying locally for black parks and beaches, black police, and a black college. A high point of Leidholdt's book is the account of Jaffé's attacks on mob justice, a stirring record of one writer's response to what he saw as inexcusable moral sluggishness in civil authorities. For his campaign urging Virginia lawmakers to adopt stiff antilynching legislation, he earned the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing. Achieving a poignant balance between Jaffé's significant professional accomplishments and the private pains he bore—including anti-Semitism, a mentally unstable wife, and an estranged son—this superb study demonstrates how Jaffé's difficulties limited him as an active liberal reformer but also fueled his prescient and impassioned warnings against Hitler's rise to power in the early thirties. Drawing extensively from primary source material, much of it previously unexamined, Editor for Justice makes an important contribution to journalism and to southern, Jewish, and black history. Readers will treasure the depiction of an extraordinary champion of human rights.