Any Minnesotan worth his lutefisk has heard of the Kensington Runestone. But have you heard of Victor Setterlund? In 1949, he uncovered another runestone less than ten miles away. How about Newmann the Great? In 1909, the Kenyon-born illusionist astonished Minneapolitans by driving a team of horses blindfolded across town to find a key hidden in a drugstore safe at Lake and Nicollet. How about little Mary Weinand? In 1915, her father demanded justice when the "meanest boy" at her one-room schoolhouse in Corcoran cut off her luxurious auburn curls. These little-known stories, along with dozens more culled from Minnesota newspaper archives, are presented here in their original form.

Turn back the yellowing pages of Minnesota's past and explore the best of the state's worst moments, as chronicled in the Minneapolis Tribune and its successor newspapers. These stories and photos, culled from the Star Tribune's microfilm archive by author Ben Welter, range from the catastrophic to the merely curious. From a fire that destroyed the State Capitol in 1881, to a wordless fistfight that broke out on a Minneapolis street in 1898, a flu outbreak that killed more than 10,000 Minnesotans in 1918 and the arrest of Frank Lloyd Wright at a Lake Minnetonka cottage in 1926.