University of Minnesota

Why is University of Minnesota Slow to Meet Obligations to Repatriate Native Artifacts?

Many institutions have been able to avoid repatriating artifacts because of the stringency of requirements that individual tribes document an affiliation with the objects in question, as well as a lack of transparency about holdings. 

Tenure, Twitter and Taking Her Board to Task

Historian at U of Minnesota "celebrates" tenure with a scathing critique of her governing board's recent actions against a building-renaming proposal. She says she couldn't have risked these statements without job security.

University of Minnesota to probe its history of racism and anti-Semitism

A committee was launched in response to a stunning new exhibit.

36 hours after the election this historian at the University of Minnesota decided to create a course on Donald Trump

His name is David Chang. And students can now take his course: “Donald Trump and the Far Right in the American History and Society.”

The Minnesota starvation experiment

Young conscientious objectors during WWII were starved for six months to help experts decide how to treat victims of mass starvation in Europe.

Regina Kunzel moves from Minnesota to Princeton

Regina Kunzel, a professor at the University of Minnesota, will join the faculty at Princeton University as of July 1, 2013.She will be the Doris Stevens Professor in Women's Studies and hold joint appointments in history and gender & sexuality studies.Kunzel is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Sex in Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (2008), which won prizes from the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and a Lambda Literary Award.She holds a B.A. from Stanford University in 1981 and her PhD from Yale University in 1990.

Ron Briley: Review of David W. Noble's "Debating the End of History" (Minnesota, 2012)

Ron Briley reviews books for the History News Network and is a history teacher and an assistant headmaster at Sandia Preparatory School, Albuquerque, New Mexico.In Debating the End of History, distinguished scholar David W. Noble, professor emeritus of American studies at the University of Minnesota, asks difficult but essential questions which must be addressed if we are to forge a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Noble challenges the conventional wisdom of perpetual economic growth upon which bourgeois culture is founded. He asks how it is possible to have continuous growth within a finite earth. In seeking an answer to this inquiry, Noble examines the evolution of his academic career within the historical and cultural context of a growing discourse on the feasibility of continuous economic growth.

Biologist debunks myth that humans peaked in Paleolithic

The abundance of Paleo diet and lifestyle recommendations suggests the answer is yes. But University of Minnesota evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk is skeptical. The Paleo ideal is a myth based on speculation rather than science, she says. As a skilled writer with an engaging sense of humor, she does an informative and entertaining job of debunking this myth in her new book, "Paleofantasy: "What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet and How We Live," to be published by W.W. Norton on March 11. Paleo proponents claim that humans fully evolved as hunter-gatherers and that the development of agriculture triggered a downward spiral, causing disease and social conflicts. But that, Zuk says, is a paleofantasy without scientific basis.

John Watkins: What Richard III Can Teach Us Today

John Watkins is distinguished McKnight university professor of English and affiliate faculty in history at the University of Minnesota.I like the idea of the hunchbacked Richard III, newly exhumed from his final resting spot beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, visiting the Oval Office. You can imagine the late, unlamented English monarch exchanging pleasantries with U.S. President Barack Obama about horseback riding and complaining about what a pain it is to deal with the intolerable French. They might also exchange notes on the inevitable headaches of leadership -- though, in Obama's case, he's not likely to take his skeet-shooting gun and parachute into Helmand province to battle the Taliban.