In 1862, four years after Minnesota was ratified as the thirty-second state in the Union, simmering tensions between indigenous Dakota and white settlers culminated in the violent, six-week-long U.S.–Dakota War. Hundreds of lives were lost on both sides, and the war ended with the execution of thirty-eight Dakotas on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota—the largest mass execution in American history. The following April, after suffering a long internment at Fort Snelling, the Dakota and Winnebago peoples were forcefully removed to South Dakota, precipitating the near destruction of the area’s native communities while simultaneously laying the foundation for what we know and recognize today as Minnesota. In North Country: The Making of Minnesota, Mary Lethert Wingerd unlocks the complex origins of the state—origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange. Moving from the earliest years of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the western Great Lakes region to the era of French and British influence during the fur trade and beyond, Wingerd charts how for two centuries prior to official statehood Native people and Europeans in the region maintained a hesitant, largely cobeneficial relationship. Founded on intermarriage, kinship, and trade between the two parties, this racially hybridized society was a meeting point for cultural and economic exchange until the western expansion of American capitalism and violation of treaties by the U.S. government during the 1850s wore sharply at this tremulous bond, ultimately leading to what Wingerd calls Minnesota’s Civil War. A cornerstone text in the chronicle of Minnesota’s history, Wingerd’s narrative is augmented by more than 170 illustrations chosen and described by Kirsten Delegard in comprehensive captions that depict the fascinating, often haunting representations of the region and its inhabitants over two and a half centuries. North Country is the unflinching account of how the land the Dakota named Mini Sota Makoce became the State of Minnesota and of the people who have called it, at one time or another, home.

A brief and readable overview of the political protest movements that have shaped Minnesota, a state of extremes.

Growing up in the mostly wooded rural countryside of northern Wisconsin, in the decades immediately after the Second World War, meant immersion in cultural transformation. An economy of subsistence and self-provisioning was rapidly becoming industrialized and commercial. The culture of the local and small-scale was being overpowered by the metropolitan and large-scale. This experience provided the practical groundedness for exploring the decline and even the demise of small-scale farming, not just in northern Wisconsin, but as an example and illustration of how industrialization and globalization undermine local rural culture everywhere. Linked with an ecological critique that asserts the unsustainability of globalized industrialism, the exploration into the meaning of rural culture took on larger significance, especially when seen in relation to the collapse of all prior civilizations. In addition, the investigation into the origins of civilization revealed the predatory relationship civilization developed in regard to agriculture and rural life. The rampant globalization of civilization results in the destitution and impoverishment of agrarian culture. The question then becomes whether civilization has finally achieved the technical mastery by which to protect and extend itself permanently or whether its complexity only assures a more catastrophic collapse or whether civilization may learn to be flexible enough to merge with an essentially noncivilized folk culture to create a new cultural sensibility that enhances the best of both worlds. This is the question the entire world is now facing. Weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and peak oil all combine the force a resolution to this dilemma.

Narratives of suspicion and mistrust have escaped the boundaries of specific sites of discourse to constitue a metanarrative that pervades American culture. Through close reading of texts ranging from novels (Pynchon's Vineland, Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Pierce's The Turner Diaries) to prison literature, this book examines the ways in which narratives of suspicion are both constitutive--and symptomatic--of a metanarrative that pervades American culture.

Originally published in 1977. This annotated guide to sources of information on the social science aspects of energy and energy alternatives describes materials and sources of interest to users at all levels. The chapters separate information according to the type of material or the issuing organization. The index classifies according to type of energy, or energy issue. The final chapter is a special section of listings of empirical social science studies on energy and the energy crisis which contain detailed annotation on the methods, variables and findings. Those research projects cover attitudes, behavior, costs, policy and other energy-related matters.

Reissuing works originally published between 1964 and 1994, this set of ten volumes is an excellent collection of works on energy – production and consumption, economics and policy, conservation and the crisis. International in scope, the volumes look at household energy conditions, energy in the developing world, political history and various other issues within the world of fuel and power. This set is a resource for environment studies, economics, policy and politics, sociology, geography and other studies considering the use of energy in our world.