The stretch of land between present-day St. Paul, Minnesota, and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, served as a highway for Native and mixed-ancestry (metis) fur traders—especially those with French heritage or kinship ties—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Building on Native trade networks, they created new communities, adapted to cultural change, and contributed to Minnesota’s recognition as a state in 1858.

Part of a Danish settlement near Tyler, the Danebod church and folk school have been a center of Danish American life for over a century. Danebod is a Danish word meaning "one who mends or saves the Danes." The Danebod community is home to programs that preserve, teach, and celebrate Danish American culture on the Minnesota prairie.

The largest secular organization of Norwegian American women to date, the Daughters of Norway, was founded in Minneapolis in 1897. Its creators worked to form a group that focused on women’s needs, their interests, and their connections to Norway.

Dayton’s began as a single store at Seventh Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis in 1902. When the last Dayton family member retired from leadership in 1983, the company had stores nationwide and profits of over $240 million. It became Target Corporation in 2000.

When Anna Salzer died while a patient at Rochester State Hospital in 1897, her death was first reported as the result of heart failure after a twelve-hour illness. Later, the cause of death was changed to pneumonia. But another patient, Lydia B. Angier, reported details about Salzer’s death to officials, writing that “every day I saw her abused—shoved about—and on the last day actually kicked.” The incident reveals how abuse contributed to excess mortality among patients confined to insane hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century.

The first issue of Ignatius Donnelly's newspaper the Emigrant Aid Journal is published in Philadelphia. The publication encourages recent immigrants to move to Nininger, a town Donnelly had founded on the Mississippi River downstream from St. Paul. Although 1,000 people lived there at its peak, the town eventually failed. The editor of the Emigrant Aid Journal was A. W. MacDonald, who later edited Scientific American.

Against a background of war in Europe and bitter pro- and anti-union activity in the Twin Cities, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party are found guilty in Minneapolis on a count of conspiring to undermine the loyalty of U.S. military forces and of publishing material advocating the overthrow of the government. Vincent R. Dunne, a leader in Teamsters Local 544, and the other defendants are, however, found not guilty on a count of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government by force.

The Northwestern Telephone Exchange Company of Minneapolis is organized, with fifty-three subscribers. The exchange begins operating in February 1879, and a line is strung to St. Paul in April 1879.

James Arness, a Minneapolis native famous for his role as marshal Matt Dillon in the western series Gunsmoke, appears on the cover of TV Guide.

After a sensational trial, Harry T. Hayward is hanged in a Minneapolis jail for the murder of Katherine Ging, owner of a fashionable dressmaking establishment. He had arranged for her to be killed so that he could collect her life insurance money.

Norman E. Borlaug, University of Minnesota alumnus and crop researcher, receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his research in hybridizing wheat to increase crop yields. Borlaug is known as the father of the green revolution.