150 best Minnesota books #14, #15, and #16: Histories by women

by Patrick Coleman, Minnesota Historical Society • June 3, 2008 •

As this primary campaign season ends, I no longer know quite what to call myself. Am I a “first wave” or a “second wave” feminist or simply, as a colleague told me, “an old feminist”? Probably the latter. I do the best I can. Bedtime reading for my daughters was frequently a book called Girls Can Be Anything in which a snotty pre-school boy keeps telling a female classmate that she can’t play with him because girls can’t be X, Y or Z. His trump card (sorry Hillary) was that girls certainly couldn’t be president. My girls grew up to be “third wave” feminists and are now both Obama supporters (sorry again Hill). C’est la vie.

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When I was raising those daughters I was becoming aware that one very important field that didn’t need to parse feminism, that didn’t seem to discriminate against woman in the least, was history. The giants of Minnesota history were all women. Lucille Kane and Sue Holbert ran the archives and manuscripts division here at the MHS. June Holmquist and Jean Brookings ran MHS Press. Nina Archabal, Rhoda Gilman, Helen White, Lila Goff, and Pat Harpole ran the rest of the institution. I was proud to work with and for those legends while studying these “Best” Minnesota books.

Agnes Larson. History of the White Pine Industry in Minnesota. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949.

Henrietta M. Larson. The Wheat Market and the Farmer in Minnesota, 1858 –1900. New York: Columbia University, 1926.

Grace Lee Nute. The Voyageur. New York: Appleton, 1931.

The Doctors Larson were business historians. However, Henrietta’s book is also an absolute necessity if you want to understand Minnesota political history! In her Columbia University M.A. Thesis on the Nonpartisan League, written six years earlier, she states that the League was “a barometer registering general conditions in the ‘wheat’ West”. Since the Nonpartisan League (about which we will have more to say later) morphed into the Farmer Labor Party, which morphed into the DFL, this book is still relevant.

Agnes’s book holds a special place in my heart. My first job at the MHS was cataloging a pile of lumbering artifacts the size of the Cathedral. I learned more about the timber industry in three hours with her book than in 9 months of handling the material culture lumbering left behind. It broke my heart to read, in her beautiful prose, that Pinus Strobus often reached over 200 feet high. In our life time one would be lucky to see a 120 foot high White Pine – what a marvelous forest that must have been.

Dr. Nute’s The Voyageur is still in print and still the best book on this important Minnesota icon, and the industry that preceded the lumbering and the milling. Much like Doris Kearns Goodwin today, she could do unparallel research and make it exquisitely accessible to a popular audience. Don’t leave home in a canoe without it.

Previous entries in this series: • #1 and #2: Theory of the Leisure Class and Giants in the Earth • #3, #4, and #5: Three state histories • #6 and #7: Two beautiful art books • #8, #9, and #10: Three nature books • #11, #12, and #13: Main Street, Babbitt, and Lake Wobegon Days