Foreword

If you are reading this foreword, it is most likely that you are also enrolled in a Minnesota History course at Saint Paul College. First, I want to welcome you to the course and this open educational resource (OER) developed to supplement its delivery. That you are part of the first classes to use the Potential and Paradox text is exciting. I have been teaching this Minnesota course for a number of years and have always wished I had the time and the resources to develop a central text that better served the college audience. During the academic year of 2021-2022, I had the opportunity to take a sabbatical from teaching to work on that task. What is before you today, is the result of that unfinished work.

At its core, Potential and Paradox attempts to create a concise narrative that can lead us through an introduction to Minnesota history while making connections to the abundant online resources of the Minnesota Historical Society. In addition, I have worked to connect Minnesota’s story to our national history by including overviews of U.S. history at the outset of each chapter. I tried to make the narrative as concise as practical to leave room to incorporate other resources. Knowing what is covered in other components of the course made this task a little more manageable. Regardless, I found it a bit tricky to decide what outside resources to incorporate to provide context without disjointing the narrative. In the end, I created a pop-up glossary of hundreds of terms mostly connected to the historical society’s online encyclopedia MNOpedia. I have also incorporated video clips into the text that serve to further expand upon points introduced in the narrative. Perhaps the most rewarding experience of this project was creating on-location interview videos with Minnesota Historical Society and National Park Service site managers. The first four of these videos are currently embedded in our text, and I am continuing to develop additional recordings. These connections, along with the additional resources provided for us in our course learning management system, attempt to provide access to useful resources without becoming overwhelming.

That I have written this book during a stressful time in the state’s and nation’s history has undoubtedly impacted its current form. We are facing a variety of challenges that include a global climate crisis, virtually unchecked gun violence, and an on-going Covid19 pandemic. We are also in the midst of a nation-wide argument over systemic racism that was propelled by George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in May of 2020. Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement it bolstered, has resulted in a “culture war” of sorts that has percolated down into our history classrooms. Institutions like Saint Paul College are working to become anti-racist and trauma-informed by developing policies and curriculum that they hope will help their communities better understand and address these challenges. On the other side of the spectrum, critics of “Critical Race Theory” (which is typically a mislabeling of the concept of systemic racism) are forcing some primary and secondary school teachers to avoid even teaching about race in their classrooms. And finally, we are attempting to pick up the pieces from a contested presidential election that failed to result in a peaceful transfer of power – a core tenet of our political system. These daunting challenges are made worse by the fact that Minnesotans and Americans fundamentally disagree about the nature of the issues and the appropriate paths forward. In fact, a failure to agree on basic facts surrounding these challenges has made meaningful discussions about them elusive.

One thing history teaches us is that it is impossible to know how historically significant current events will become because we do not yet have the benefit of time to understand the long-term impacts. Will world governments be able to cooperate to slow the warming of the planet? Will the protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s murder result in meaningful changes? Will the unprecedented political crisis we are facing be overcome or bring an end to our democratic government? We can’t, currently, know the answers to these questions. A collective understanding of our history, however, will equip us to better meet these challenges. Additionally, knowing our history provides a bit of reassurance – we have been in difficult situations in the past and have found workable – although never perfect – ways forward.

-Kurt Kortenhof, July 7, 2022