On the occasion of Minnesota's 150th anniversary of statehood, over a hundred historians and other writers assembled to discuss the subjects they had been studying, thinking, and writing about. This book presents the best of that work, including nineteen essays on topics as varied as baseball at Native American boarding schools, nineteenth-century predictions for Minnesota's future, Native American tourist goods, the Kensington rune stone, and a memoir of growing up in Marshall. Bringing together some of the most recent and best thinking about Minnesotas past and its people, this book demonstrates the history of this place, in all its rich complexity, before and after statehood. Contributors include Melodie Andrews, Annette Atkins, Marge Barrett, Matt Callahan, Emily Ganzel, Linda LeGarde Grover, Louis Jenkins, David J. Laliberte, James Madison, J. Thomas Murphy, Nora Murphy, Traci M. Nathans-Kelly, Paula Nelson, Patrick Nunnally, Linda Schloff, Gregory Schroeder, Hamp Smith, Barbara W. Sommer, Tangi Villerbu, Howard J. Vogel, Steven Werle, Bill Wittenbreer, and Michael Zalar.

Atkins eloquently portrays the extreme hardships of Minnesota farmers during the grasshopper plagues of the 1870s. She examines local, state, and national relief efforts, which she reviews in the context of 19th-century social welfare philosophy.

While much attention has been devoted to connections in American families between husbands and wives and between parents and children, We Grew Up Together enters virtually uncharted territory by exploring the emotional relationships among siblings.

Through the letters brothers and sisters wrote to each other over the course of nearly a century (1840-1920), Annette Atkins reveals the inner workings of ten nineteenth-century families, illuminating their everyday lives and central relationships. Drawing on the insights of Alfred Adler and others, Atkins examines the varying dynamics of "warm" and "cool" families, clothing theory in the human relations revealed by the letters. She looks at families located in various regions, families headed to the frontier, obscure families, and prominent names such as the Blairs of Washington, D.C.

The correspondence between brothers and sisters sheds light not only on the emotional fabric of their families but also on the way they learn to express themselves. Atkins shows how siblings tutored each other in friendship, authority, cooperation and competition, dependence and independence. They learned from each other how to express (or repress) emotions, how to see themselves, and how to be in the world.

By exploring individual families in intimate detail, We Grew Up Together counters simplistic notions of traditional family life in an earlier era. Through family upheaval, abandonment, divorce, death, and conflict, siblings sustained vital familial links with each other, providing connection, stability, permanence, and emotional grounding that often persisted throughout their lives.