Twin Cities Album

Through hundreds of photographs and entertaining commentary and entertaining commentary, veteran author Dave Kenney offers a virtual tour through 150 years of events and movements that shaped the culture and landscape of the Twin Cities. The first complete history of Minneapolis and St Paul published in two decades. The book spans their ramshackle beginnings as cross-river rivals to their thriving metropolitan partnership today. Early photographs show ghosts of nineteenth-century life Chr(45) shop-keepers loading oxcarts on downtown streets. Photographs of former GIs with their young families reveal a changed Minnesota after World War II. Images of the early local television programmes give way to those of dramatic protests at the University of Minnesota during the 1960s. Labour strikes and block parties, Kent Hrbek and Garrison Keillor, Native American sit-ins, lost architectural gems, new immigrants, the demolition of Ronda, riverfront flour mills, shows at First Avenue: these soaring images together comprise a collective portrait of the neighbourhoods we call home.

Dave Kenney is author of the award-winning Northern Lights: The Stories of Minnesota's Past, the state history textbook, and of Minnesota Goes to War: The Home Front during World War II (both from Minnesota Historical Society Press). He is a  television producer and communications consultant in the Twin Cities.