Minnesota History Magazine Summer 2017 (65:6)

• Loyalty Within Racism: The Segregated Sixteenth Battalion of the Minnesota Home Guard During World War I by Peter J. DeCarlo
• “We have looked all throughout the market and cannot find anything satisfactory”: Reproducing Textiles for the James J. Hill House by Ann Frisina
• “Everybody thinks it’s right to give the child away”: Unwed Mothers at Booth Memorial Hospital 1961–63 by Kim Heikkila

ARTICLES

Loyalty Within Racism: The Segregated Sixteenth Battalion of the Minnesota Home Guard During World War Il

by Peter J. DeCarlo

The Sixteenth was the only Home Guard unit that recruited African Americans and marked the first time the state military allowed for the recruitment of black men. The story of the segregated unit reveals a complex and conflicted Twin Cities African American community during a time of great trial.

“We have looked all throughout the market and cannot find anything satisfactory”: Reproducing Textiles for the James J. Hill House

by Ann Frisina

Uncovering just who designed the textiles that once hung in the grand main hall and dining room of the James J. Hill House was a crucial breakthrough in the complicated five-plus-year process of reproducing them.

“Everybody thinks it’s right to give the child away”: Unwed Mothers at Booth Memorial Hospital 1961–63

by Kim Heikkila

Maternity homes for unwed mothers, such as St. Paul’s Booth Hospital, reached their peak in the United States in the early 1960s. Prevailing cultural assumptions led most single, white pregnant girls and women in midcentury America—including the author’s mother—to make the difficult decision to surrender their babies for adoption.

DEPARTMENTS

Eyewitness

Wing Young Huie ponders the ways the most interesting photographs challenge what we think we know.

Landmarks

Dakota County’s Castle Rock is not what it used to be, as Larry Millett explains.

Back Space

A gathering of reviews, your letters, news and notes, and a new feature, Our Back Pages, which mines the archives of Minnesota History

Book Reviews

The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape
Pick Three

Letters

News & Notes

Our Back Pages

About the cover…

Dr. Obadiah D. Howard, soldier in the Sixteenth Battalion of the Minnesota Home Guard and his grandson, Raymond H. Maxwell, 1918. Howard was 57 years old when he enlisted in the Home Guard. He was a physician and barber and lived in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood at 417 Carroll Street. (MNHS COLLECTIONS)

Visit Minnesota History at: www.mnhs.org/mnhistory