Monthly Forum

For many years restrictive covenants in deeds and documents related to real estate transactions reserved land for the exclusive use of white people. Research involving academics, community  activists, and community members unearth the evidence of these practices. This allowed a map to be made showing how these restrictive practices were embedded in the physical landscape.…

Rock Steady Boxing (RSB) is a non-contact boxing program that helps people with Parkinson’s through intense exercise, camaraderie, and good fun. Established in Indianapolis in 2006, RSB has 900 affiliate programs throughout the world, including three in the metro area. Recalling former heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, his masked…

Earth Day, 51 years old this year, has grown into an entire month of events encouraging us to recognize the importance of our impact on the planet. Our April speaker, Brenn Fromm, self-proclaimed Master Recycler and advocate for Planet Earth is going to energize us through an informative and interactive session. This will be a…

Ellingtonia, The Great Migration and The Promised Land This presentation will focus around two poems in my book, "The Promised Land." I will start with a short reading of the title poem of the book, "The Promised Land" and also read the poem, "Ellingtonia." I will then briefly discuss how I think the poems interface and…

Well-known Minnesota architect Cass Gilbert spent much of his early career designing homes and other buildings around the White Bear area.  Rheanna O’Brien of the White Bear Lake Area Hustorical Society will present an illustrated program as we discuss his early work. Some of those buildings still stand, while others have either not survived or were never built.…

Presenter: Erica Nutzman will give a brief overview of the history of the library as well as describe the unique resource collections available for research at the Minnesota State Law Library. In particular, there are a number of different resources about court personnel, particularly oral history resources and other materials about specific judges. There are…

How long does copyright protection for fictional characters last? Why are people still suing about Sherlock Holmes whose last appearance in an Arthur Conan Doyle story was in 1927. What is in the public domain and free to all and what can land you in court? Join us for an excursion into the wonderful world…

Why has our famously liberal political culture been at the same time so brutally hard on minorities? Looking at wealth gaps, incarceration, life expectancy etc. we vie with Mississippi, How to explain how the land of Humphry, Mondale, Wellstone, Gene McCarthy has turned out to treat dark skinned people the way it has? Answers date…

Are Asia and America connected? This geographic question occupied Russian explorers, entrepreneurs, and tsars in the 17th century. The answer led them to probe the American coast, trade for furs, and map the land. Alaska remained part of the Russian empire until it was sold to the U.S. Learn about this unique history as it…

Rent control comes in many varieties in the U.S. In this talk, Prof. Edward Goetz of the University of Minnesota describes the range of different approaches that have been used by cities across the country and summarizes what the research says about their impacts. Goetz will then take a look at the Minneapolis and St.…

  What role can the public library play in publishing community voices and creating communitas? The year 2020 was especially difficult for Minnesotans as we weathered the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd's murder amidst a highly volatile political climate. Librarians at Ramsey County Library wanted to help connect our community members with each other and us…

Donna Isaac will read from each of her publications as well as new poems she is working on. Teacher and Poet, Donna Isaac holds English degrees from James Madison University and the University of MN, and her MFA from Hamline University. Her published works include three chapbooks: Tommy (Red Dragonfly Press); Holy Comforter (Red Bird Chapbooks), Persistence of Vision (Finishing Line…

What was the reality of war for a state so far from Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan? Learn the stories of ordinary people who went to far flung battlefields or struggled with rationing to provide the tools of war to those in the combat zone. Was Minnesota's story unique? What was the Greatest Generation of…

J. Drake Hamilton, Senior Director, Science Policy, Fresh Energy, will explain that President Biden, on November 1, 2021, was at the Global Climate Summit held in Glasgow, Scotland. To 40,000 people assembled there from 198 countries, Biden committed to reducing U.S. global warming emissions by 50% by the year 2030. She will discuss the factors…

Based on his 2018-2019 oral history project, “We Don’t Want You to Go Either,” Peter Simmons will talk about Minnesotans who, during 1967-1970, took part in raids on Selective Service offices (draft boards) in Minnesota and elsewhere, aiming to cripple the ability of the government to conscript young Americans into the military during the never…

The Great Depression New Deal-era program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), has been recognized as the largest conservation program in U.S. history. Its Minnesota story is a fascinating one, involving young men from the state and from nearby states, young Black Minnesota citizens, and enrolled men from Minnesota’s Indian Reservations. Drawing on more than 100…

We can’t grow our way out of the problems such as climate change. That means neither growth nor “degrowth”. Malcolm X has said that a chicken cannot produce a duck egg. It’s not in its system. The problems lie within the bio/physical nature of the planet and the problems that have been precipitated by humans,…

Traveling without aggravation, especially with our families and young folk was never easy for Black people during the Jim Crowe Era and before the signing of Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Negro Motorist Green Book (Green Book) by Victor H Green helped Black people find safe and welcoming tourist homes (boarding homes), restaurants, and other businesses…

Restorative justice is a grassroots movement, growing out of the 70s, that offers an alternative perspective on crime and how crime is addressed. Though its origin lies in the modern criminal justice system, the paradigm and processes of restorative justice have ancient underpinnings, as well as relevance in other contexts. Restorative processes hold rich potential…

From its humble beginnings as a one-room cabinet of scientific specimens, the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum has grown to be an important cultural institution with a new public museum on the St Paul Campus. In this illustrated talk, Luce will trace the museum’s evolution, and highlight a sample of its remarkable history of programs…

Evelyn D. Klein will read from her new book Fear and Promise, Remembering the Year 2020. She will discuss the notion of poet as historian, bringing in famous poets of the past. The book is a chrocicle of the year's events that impacted people's lives, yet despite the challenges, as she points out, it also moved us…

In the early-1950's diagnosing medical conditions was greatly assisted by organizing the human body into 7 levels. This led some educational Institutions to begin naming their biological departments as "Life Sciences".  Within these new departments there emerged areas referred to as Bio-Chemistry, Bio-Physics, and Bio-Math, followed by Bio-Medicine, Bio-Engineering, Bio-Metrics, and more. As all this…

The nationally known Edward S. Curtis documented 80 Native American tribes in the Western United States back in the 1890's through 1920's, through photographs, recording their music, myths and religion, history, language, and life-styles. He grew up in Le Sueur County, Elysian and Cordova Townships.  Because of his father's illness, Edward moved with his family…

Join the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum to learn all about Ranked Choice Voting, a top reform to strengthen our democracy. Jeanne Massey, Executive Director of FairVote Minnesota and a national expert on ranked choice voting will discuss the increasing divisions and extremism in our politics, the corrosive effect it is having on our democracy and…

Founded in 1928, the University of Minnesota Archives is the official repository of the institution and a rich source of local, national, and international history that intersects with the people and programs of the university. In this presentation, Erik Moore will highlight a piece of institutional history that connects Federal projects, renewable energy, corporate interests,…

It was 1905 and Americans were in love with electricity. More than 400 trolley car parks sprang up around the country. But only a handful had an Infantorium, a hospital (of sorts) that treated premature babies. For the price of admission, guests could watch performers like Daredevil Dash and Nervo the Human Comet. There were…

For the past several years, I worked on the Indigenous Oral History Manual: Canada and the United States, with authors Winona Wheeler, Charles E. Trimble (posthumous), and Mary Kay Quinlan. The book focuses on the role of Indigenous voices in Indigenous history. As Māori oral historian Nepia Mahuika wrote in 2019, “I argue that indigenous…

In the early 1900s, Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of over 1600 libraries in this country, 66 of which were in Minnesota. The first half of the talk will describe the Carnegie library program and its impact on Minnesota; the second half will assess the extent to which the libraries have survived after more than…

Ken Meter’s book Building Community Food Webs (Island Press, 2021) harvests insights from several decades of work in communities across the US who are grappling with how to create healthier, more localized food systems.

The book begins with an overview showing how the US food system has extracted wealth from rural and urban areas, and then goes on to highlight 8 community efforts in Montana, Hawai’i, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, and Minnesota that have mounted robust community foods initiatives, showing what elements have contributed to each success. Ken's research and writing have been carried out independently, with no institutional support.

Joseph A. Amato will read poems about place (Detroit, Southwest Minnesota, and Sicily), family, memory, aging, death, and hope and gratitude. They will be drawn from some of his published books, Buoyancies: The Ballast Master’s Log, My Three Sicilies Poems, Stories, and Essays and Trinity of Hope, plus poems published in Sicilian and Italian-American and other publications An Open Mic will follow the program.

Following many centuries of mostly agrarian lives, more than half of the people on our planet now live in cities.  Early industrial cities were a mess, choked with smog, filthy water, large epidemics, to the point that lifespans around 1900 were shorter for folks living in cities than the countryside.

This talk examines the progress we’ve made, and some ideas for future progress, illustrated in part by Larry Baker's own research. We’ll continue this vein with a structured discussion to dive deeper on the topic of “improving our odds” for the livability of cities in the future

Evelyn Klein will discuss how and why this book came about in the course of her teaching English, language arts and world languages for many years. In order to be successful both in expository and creative writing, students needed a solid base of skills. By introducing students to the essentials of the English language in…

Becca and Lynn will share with you a housing model unfamiliar in the USA, Cohousing. It is a type of intentional community that will reduce our carbon footprint, reduce loneliness and get us a lot more fun in the process. There are examples of about 180 cohousing communities across the US and we will share views of them.

Why do people keep deep secrets about their lives and ancestry?  In Family Declassified (Sunbury Press, 2023) Katherine Fennelly applied her expertise as a social science researcher to answer this question regarding her grandfather, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant who arrived in the US one hundred years ago and who became a high-ranking spy for the Allies…

A string of jaw-dropping coincidences in the last week of WWII had Colonel Matt Konop liberating the same Czech villages his grandparents had left for Wisconsin in the 1860s. Konop’s first language was Czech, and the townspeople paraded him around town on their shoulders, declaring, “one of our own has freed us!” However, like many…

Complexity sciences, and their applications to human systems,  have been around since the early 1980s, but the power in academe, business, industry, and government still sit squarely in Newtonian worldviews. Why? What are the  challenges of thinking through the lens of complex adaptive systems? In the history of science, practice leads theory into a new paradigm.…

From such historic luminaries as Seth Eastman and Alexis Fournier to contemporary artists Jim Denomie and Dan Bruggeman, this lecture will review the nearly 200 year history of artmaking in Minnesota. Bring your questions. Art historian Brian Szott, Curator of Art at the Minnesota Historical Society from 2001 to 2022, organized numerous exhibitions including Seth Eastman: Artist on the Frontier, Thank God and FDR, and Art Speaks. Previously,…

Peace is a shared aspiration and value in all of our religious traditions. Peace, however, remains an ever-receding goal in our world. Speaking of peace as a shared value is important, but it does not bring about peace. Our traditions offer us transformative peace-making teachings, but these traditions are located in historical and socio-political contexts.…

Drunks, criminals, and rowdies went to Minnehaha Falls to raise a ruckus, dance, and have fun.  From the 1860s until the early 20th century, Minnehaha Falls was not a family-oriented destination.  Rather, it was a scene of scandal and disreputable behavior.  By 1891, things had gotten so bad that “Father of the Parks" Charles Loring…