A chronological compendium of remarkable and curious events in the history of the North Star State

Minnesotans are a highly skilled bunch, whether pursuing traditional activities like wild ricing and pickling, or tastefully displaying taxidermy, or selecting the right fishing bait. Skills particularly appropriate to Minnesota-- such as creating seed art or baking a Bundt cake--may be fully on display at the state fair, a prime opportunity to join with neighbors in celebrating our many talents. The Minnesota Book of Skills brings to life the basic know-how that makes us uniquely Minnesotan. Seasonal tips like how to gracefully exit a ski lift mingle with skills your grandparents knew well, such as what to forage for while on a hike. How soon is too soon to bring a child to the Boundary Waters or set her up on hockey skates? The answers are here. Maybe you'll never carve an ice sculpture or build your own coffin--but isn't it comforting to know that one handy book offers just the guidance you'll need?

More than 30 years of experience photographing Lake Superior culminate in Minnesotaís North Shore, a melding of classic landscapes with images of incredible freshness and spontaneity. The book includes video footage of the North Shore on DVD.

Have you ever wondered how the Mississippi River was formed? Or why shark teeth have been found in the Iron Range of the Upper Midwest? Towering mountain ranges, explosive volcanoes, expansive glaciers, and long-extinct forms of both land and sea life were an important part of Minnesota's ancient history. Today the evidence of this remarkable heritage is revealed in the state's rocky outcroppings, stony soils, and thousands of lakes.

Minnesota's Natural Heritage: An Ecological Perspective is the first comprehensive book available on the Minnesota environment. Including thorough and accessible analyses of the state's geologic history and climate, this is the essential book for tourists, naturalists, teachers, scientists, and residents of the state.

A true epic: a love story that spans sixty years, generations’ worth of feuds, and secrets withheld and revealed. One day, elderly, demented Harry Eide steps out of his sickbed and disappears into the brutal, unforgiving Minnesota wilderness that surrounds his hometown of Gunflint. It's not the first time Harry has vanished. Thirty-odd years earlier, in 1963, he'd fled his marriage with his eighteen-year-old-son Gustav in tow. He'd promised Gustav a rambunctious adventure, two men taking on the woods in winter. With Harry gone for the second (and last) time, unable to survive the woods he'd once braved, his son Gus, now grown, sets out to relate the story of their first disappearance--bears and ice floes and all--to Berit Lovig, an old woman who shares a special, if turbulent, bond with Harry. Wintering is a thrilling adventure story wrapped in the deep, dark history of a rural town.

From the author of The Latehomecomer, a powerful memoir of her father, a Hmong song poet who sacrificed his gift for his children's future in America In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine. Written with the exquisite beauty for which Kao Kalia Yang is renowned, The Song Poet is a love story -- of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all that they have lost.

Life stories of ordinary people of Minnesota, through the form of letters, diaries, & photographs. Every day life from the beginning of the 19th century to the dawn of World War II.

Winner of a Spur Award, presented by the Western Writers of America (WWA), for the Best Western Nonfiction Historical Book. Renowned historian Annette Atkins presents a fresh understanding of how a complex and modern Minnesota came into being in Creating Minnesota. Each chapter of this innovative state history focuses on a telling detail, a revealing incident, or a meaningful issue that illuminates a larger event, social trends, or politics during a period in our past. A three-act play about Minnesota's statehood vividly depicts the competing interests of Natives, traders, and politicians who lived in the same territory but moved in different worlds. Oranges are the focal point of a chapter about railroads and transportation: how did a St. Paul family manage to celebrate their 1898 Christmas with fruit that grew no closer than 1,500 miles from their home? A photo essay brings to life three communities of the 1920s, seen through the lenses of local and itinerant photographers. The much-sought state fish helps to explain the new Minnesota, where pan-fried walleye and walleye quesadillas coexist on the same north woods menu. In Creating Minnesota Atkins invites readers to experience the texture of people's lives through the decades, offering a fascinating and unparalleled approach to the history of our state.