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Twin Cities metropolitan
area of St. Paul and
Minneapolis:
• Ranks 4th as a college
destination, after Boston/
Cambridge, Washington,
D.C., and the San Francisco
Bay Area.
• Home to 3 million people,
the 16th largest metro area
in the U.S.
• Headquarters for more
than a dozen Fortune 500
companies.
• Five professional sports
teams, NFL, NHL, NBA,
WNBA, and MLB.
• Only New York City has
more theater seats per capita.
• The Green Guide ranks
St. Paul 4th in the nation
on air quality, electricity
use, green space, recycling
and water quality.
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As a West Coaster, my knowledge
of Minnesotan history and culture
was relatively limited—lutefisk, Lake
Wobegon and that unmistakable accent
from the movie Fargo. Furthermore, I
naively assumed that St. Paul and Minneapolis
were merely different names
for the same homogeneous, sprawling
urban center. I was astounded to
find out that the Twin Cities weren’t
quite as similar as I had imagined. The
combination of historical documents,
classroom discussions and personal
exploration showed me two very different
urban centers with regional
differences that exist to this day. Minneapolis
formed on the basis of the St.
Anthony Falls and became a center for
grain production, while St. Paul risked
its fortunes on industry and railroads.
These cities are also home to an array
of ethnic populations; I hadn’t pictured
stereotypically white Minnesota to
have such vibrant Hmong, Hispanic
and Somali communities.
As I continued to explore, I couldn’t
avoid “historicizing” my environment
into the context of our class. How did
global trends, such as the rise of capitalism
in the nineteenth century, affect
these very neighborhoods through
which I bike? How did the progressive
Farmer-Labor Party of the 1900s eventually
combine with the Democratic
Party whose lawn signs I saw in the
fall? To what extent am I, as a Macalester
student, now part of the new face
of a “national” Minnesota, and thus,
part of Minnesota history?
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The class is well suited for discussion
and debate, and as a first-year residential
class, my classmates are literally
my next-door neighbors. While other
liberal arts schools may pride themselves
on being intellectual havens,
Macalester offers rigorous academics
within the bustling, surrounding community
of the Twin Cities. This bridge
between book smarts and street smarts
teaches us to examine the relationship
between a historical thesis and a place,
to understand political ideologies and
how they are tailored to specific communities,
and the confluence of both
global and local forces that shape the
world. |
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