Many people suffered from the collapse of Wilbur Foshay’s Public Utilities Consolidated Corporation (PUCC)—chiefly the company’s investors, who lost their money, and Foshay and his associates, who went to prison. But those who suffered most were neither. The tragic figures turned out to be a juror, Genevieve Clark, and her family.

On June 15, 1920, a mob of 10,000 people oversaw the lynching of three African American circus workers falsely accused of rape in downtown Duluth. In the face of community silence after the event, the lynchings faded from public memory. Efforts to acknowledge the lynchings, remember the victims, and begin community healing led to the identification of the three workers’ graves in 1991 and the creation of a memorial plaza in Duluth in 2003.

Nina Clifford, a child of immigrants who evolved into the “richest woman of the underworld,” made a name for herself as an affluent sex worker who contributed to the buildup of St. Paul’s downtown Red Light District in the late 1800s. She invited other women to establish their businesses nearby while police sanctioned an environment in which vice could thrive. In spite of a lack of preserved records, standing buildings, and extant photographs related to her business, Nina Clifford remains a legendary madam of St. Paul.

What David Marston (D.M.) Clough lacked in education and polish he made up for in common sense and drive, serving as Minnesota's thirteenth governor during his rise from lumberman to lumber baron.

In 1939, a small-town doctor and his wife created a striking amateur film that captured their Minnesota community near the end of the Great Depression. The film is now included in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which recognizes it as a significant documentary of rural life.

The fate of the Union army hung in the balance on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Confederate soldiers punched a hole in its defenses and only the men of the First Minnesota Infantry, led by Colonel William Colvill, stood in their way.

Though taconite was identified as an iron-bearing rock on the Iron Ranges of northern Minnesota long before the 1950s, it wasn’t until then that it was extracted, processed, and shipped to steel mills on the Great Lakes. As natural ore reserves diminished, taconite became an alternative source of iron that allowed the Iron Range to continue mining operations in a changing global economy.

Minnesota's first zoo opened in St. Paul in 1897 with three donated deer in a fenced-in pasture. More than 100 years later Como Zoo continues its mission of animal conservation, education, and family entertainment.

Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio (CLUES) is the largest Latino-led nonprofit in Minnesota. It formed in 1981 in St. Paul in response to the need for language-appropriate, culturally competent mental health services for the Latino Spanish-speaking community. Throughout the history of CLUES, as the Latino community has grown, the agency’s leaders have identified new opportunities to support Latino children, families, and individuals.

Founded in 1994, the Minneapolis-based Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota (CSCM) is one of the oldest Somali-operated nonprofit organizations in the state. For more than two decades, it has provided job and education services as well as health care and legal assistance to members of the community who face language and cultural barriers.

Connemara Patch began as a community of Irish immigrants on St. Paul’s East Side in the early 1880s. An unintended result of Bishop John Ireland’s Catholic colonization efforts and a victim of 1950s freeway construction, it was a small, swampy neighborhood on the banks of Phalen Creek. Despite its short and oft-forgotten existence, Connemara Patch was home to several generations of Irish working-class families and later immigrant groups.

Marvel Cooke was a pioneering journalist and political activist who spent her groundbreaking career in a world where she was often the only female African American. Talking about her work environment for the white-owned newspaper the Compass, she told biographer Kay Mills in 1988, ''there were no black workers there and no women."