Bob CollinsFor 156 years, the Santee Dakota people have waited for what happened in a casino conference room in Santee, Nebraska. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Regional history
Walt Straka, 98, is the only surviving member of the 194th Tank Battalion in Brainerd, who were ordered to the Philippines in September 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor. They were the first tank unit in the Far East. Read more →
Eau Claire has a tough decision to make. Should it dig into the community couch cushions for the $4 it’ll take to buy Soo Line #2719, currently at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth. Read more →
Michael Barone’s radio career was launched when Garrison Keillor, who did the KSJR morning show, floated down the Mississippi River while recording artists. When the tapes back to the station didn’t arrive on time, Barone got his shot. He’s been on MPR ever since. Read more →
It’s hard to figure out who the bad person here that everyone seems to be aghast at. Everyone may not want to be looking at all the new houses, but everyone seems to be buying them. Read more →
When Phyllis and Bob Litherland started the Dairy Queen in Moorhead in 1949, their friends told them fast food was just a fad that would never last. They didn’t listen, even if it meant they had to sleep in the backroom while pouring their money into the place.
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The little airport in Silver Bay is gone now and now Wayne Johnson, the force behind its creation, is too. Read more →
Dick Bancroft wasn’t a photographer by training, but he started photographing Minnesotans involved in the peace movement for the Saint Paul Dispatch newspaper. He went on to chronicle the American Indian Movement. He never sold a picture, he said. Read more →
Litchfield’s drive-in theater is one of only six remaining drive-ins in Minnesota. Dave Quincer aims to keep it alive.
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In the 11 years of NewsCut, Wally Englund stands out as one of the most memorable people I’ve met in the course of learning of and telling their stories. Read more →
Spending an afternoon with a 100-year-old person is an invitation to examine how we square the daily reality that life alternates trying to kill us and trying to soothe us. Read more →
One doesn’t have to go to Appalachia to see the poverty and ghost towns from failed and abandoned mining. One need only take a relatively short drive from Minnesota to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where copper mining isn’t what it once was. Read more →
As of today, I’ve written 14,318 NewsCut posts and I can tell you a story about most of them, including my favorite interviews with people that made me thankful I got into this line of work.
If there are afternoons I’ve enjoyed more than August 7, 2013, I can’t think of them. Read more →
An exhibit last fall illuminated a racist past at the University of Minnesota, forcing leaders to confront its own history. Now, a student government group is urging a building honoring a segregationist be renamed. Read more →
There’s nothing that can’t stir up people. A 60-foot mermaid’s demise? Easy pickings. Read more →