Twin Cities Album: A Visual History

Through hundreds of photographs 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, Twin Cities Album: A Visual History spans their ramshackle beginnings as cross-river rivals to their thriving metropolitan partnership today.

Early photographs show ghosts of nineteenth-century city life—shopkeepers loading oxcarts on downtown streets, St. Paulites riding the first streetcars. Fascinating images of automobiles and airplanes reflect the technological boom of the first decades of the 1900s. Photos of former GIs with their young families reveal a changed Minnesota after World War II. Images of the early local television programs give way to those of dramatic protests at the University of Minnesota during the 1960s. Photographs of a new Guthrie Theater and the christening of the first skyway in Minneapolis reveal the evolving face of the cities in the 1980s and 1990s.

Labor strikes and block parties, Kent Hrbek and Garrison Keillor, Native American sit-ins, lost architectural gems, new immigrants, the demolition of Rondo, riverfront flour mills, shows at First Avenue: these soaring images together comprise a collective portrait of the neighborhoods we call home.