MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY. MINNESOTA ETHNIC HISTORY PROJECT:

The Minnesota Ethnic History Project (MEHP) operated under the auspices of the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) from 1973 to 1981, and culminated in the book, They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups. As explained in the preface, the project's main objective was to "bring together in a single volume information on the major ethnic populations that have resided in Minnesota during the 130 years from 1850 to 1980," but also to act as a launching point for further, more exhaustive treatment of Minnesota's ethnic history. Project records indicate that plans to collect and retain the data and research notes compiled and created during the course of the project, in order to facilitate additional research, existed from an early stage. As the press release touting the inauguration of MEHP in October of 1973 emphasized, the project was not only ground-breaking in the field of Minnesota history but, as the first such effort in the country, it set a new standard nationally.

The Minnesota Ethnic History Project began as the inspiration of Carlton C. Qualey, a former director of the Minnesota Historical Society, an MHS research fellow, and noted scholar in the field of immigration history. Discussion of the idea began as early as the late 1960s but financial backing, in the form of grants from the Minnesota Legislature and the Bush Foundation of St. Paul, was not secured until 1973. With funding secured the project proceeded in two phases. Phase One, directed by Qualey from 1973 to 1978, involved the creation of a statistical base and the gathering of additional pertinent research on all groups for the period from the beginnings of settlement to 1930. During this period initial drafts of most of the chapters were written and a general scheme of organization devised. Phase Two, from 1978 to 1981, encompassed the assembling of data for all groups from 1930 to the 1980s, as well as the bulk of the writing, and was carried out under the direction of June Drenning Holmquist, then head of the Minnesota Historical Society's publishing program, with the assistance of research coordinator Deborah L. (Stultz) Miller.

As illustrated in the records of the project, much of the research utilized the rich resources in the Society's own collections, which had benefited from an emphasis on ethnic history source materials in the collection policy of the preceding decades. In addition, researchers drew upon the materials in the University of Minnesota's immigration history collections and other local historical societies, as well as a great deal of field research including hundreds of interviews with immigrants and their descendants. As the project drew to a close in the late 1970s, efforts were made to reclaim as much of the research notes and other related material as possible from the various individuals involved in the study, resulting in a dense collection of data that documents both the ethnic groups that settled in Minnesota and the project itself.

Historical information on the Minnesota Ethnic History Project was taken from the preface of They Chose Minnesota and from the collection.

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The Minnesota Ethnic History Project (MEHP) records consist of correspondence, reports, research notes, statistical data, chapter drafts, and other related material documenting the process of researching, writing, and editing the book They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups. Records are arranged in two major series: administrative records documenting the organization, coordination, and funding of the project, and research records consisting of the actual data gathered in the process of writing the book.

The administrative records, while only a small portion of the collection, provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the project as it developed from its initial discussion stage into one of the Minnesota Historical Society's most prominent and ambitious publishing ventures. Materials include correspondence, memoranda, grant proposals, contracts, reports, critiques of chapters, clippings, and other related papers. Two files contain correspondence and memoranda from and concerning Carlton C. Qualey. Materials in these files are particularly notable as they illustrate the evolution of the project, describing it as Qualey first conceived it in a memo to then Director of MHS, Russell Fridley, and including many subsequent plans and schemes for its content and organization as research progressed. The materials in these files also describe the early attempts at securing grants to fund the study and provide some interesting insights into the relationship between Qualey and his colleagues at the Society. A group of five folders contain records kept by June Drenning Holmquist and Deborah L. (Stultz) Miller, including a great deal of correspondence with researchers and chapter authors concerning the writing and editing process, as well as guidelines on chapter organization and content drawn up for distribution to the writers. There are also comments and notes on many chapters provided by scholars who were asked by the editors to critique the work of the writers. Other materials in the series include contracts and other employment and administrative paperwork, as well as a very useful series of monthly reports. While these reports only exist from 1979 to 1980, they provide a helpful overview of the project during that period just before publication of the book.

Comprising, by far, the bulk of the collection, the research records include census and other statistical data, indexes to ethnic information in various sources, copies of relevant papers and articles, newspaper clippings, research notes, chapter drafts, and other miscellaneous materials gathered and created by the various researchers and writers involved in the project. The first part of the series contains initial drafts written by Qualey and reflecting an early, geographical and topical organizational scheme, which was later discarded for a group by group organization. A collection of materials grouped under the rubric "background files: indexes and raw data," is a valuable starting point for further research, as it includes detailed indexes to information on ethnic groups found in complex sources available at MHS, such as the Northern Pacific and Great Northern railway records and the large collection of county histories. The indexes give the page numbers or other location where data on each ethnic group researched for the MEHP may be found in these sources and, as they were created without the aid of modern computer technology, represent a significant portion of the staff time funded in the first phase of the project. A great deal of time during the first two years of the project was also devoted to extracting and compiling data from the censuses to reveal the ethnic composition of the state over the years. This data, which was later used to create the maps and charts in the book, is included in raw form in the collection. Although initial plans called for computer analysis of the statistical data gathered from the census and other sources, the data was instead compiled manually for the most part. As the preface of They Chose Minnesota points out, this systematic transcription from the manuscript censuses resulted in figures that were often quite different from the published statistics. Summary charts showing the numbers of immigrants from various countries (and migrants from other parts of the U.S.) residing in each county during the years 1850 to 1970 are found in a separate oversize folder (These charts are also available on microfilm) along with color population maps created from the charts.

The balance of the collection consists of topically arranged research files organized in three major groups: materials on ethnic groups, church- and religion-related files, and a set of miscellaneous, alphabetically arranged topical files. The church- and religion-related files, compiled by researcher Susan Diebold, include her essays on fifteen different Christian denominations in Minnesota, along with separate files of research notes and articles on most of them. The files also include an index to the Society's collection of WPA church surveys, which provides a township by township listing of all churches surveyed, with a cross-index by denomination and language.

Unquestionably a highlight, as well as the largest portion of this collection, the series of research files on each ethnic group defined and chronicled in They Chose Minnesota are arranged in roughly alphabetical order by ethnic group name. This organization reflects the chapter organization of the book, which grouped certain ethnic groups together. For example, Russians and Ukrainians are under "East Slavs" rather than after the Romanians, as would be the case if they were filed strictly alphabetically. Also, the Asian groups (with the exception of the Japanese) are organized as a separate group at the end. The files include statistical information, articles, newspaper clippings, newsletters, research notes (sometimes on individual notecards), chapter drafts, and other related material compiled by the researchers and writers for that ethnic group. The Asian materials, in particular, contain a large number of interview notes based on oral histories, some of which are available on audio tape as well (see note on related materials). Note that these interview notes were organized within this collection primarily by geographic location (residence) of the interviewee rather than by name. While project administrators made an effort to retain as much of the raw data and other research material as possible, documentation in the administrative records suggests that in some cases supporting materials were owned and retained by the persons contracted to write the individual chapters.

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These documents are organized into the following sections:

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Availability:

The collection is open for research use.

Preferred Citation:

[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. Minnesota Historical Society Ethnic History Project Records. Minnesota Historical Society.

See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional examples.

Microfilm Production:

St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1974.

Accession Information:

Accession number: 11,742; 15,345

Processing Information:

Processed by: Lara D. Friedman, November 1996

Catalog ID number: 990017370110104294

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Correspondence Files

Miscellaneous Administrative Files

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Early Drafts

Background Files: Indexes and Raw Data

Topical Research Files

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The Carlton C. Qualey Papers, which include additional material on his work as director of the Minnesota Ethnic History Project, are cataloged separately in the Minnesota Historical Society manuscript collections under the heading: Qualey, Carlton C.

Audio tapes of Sarah Mason's interviews with Asian Minnesotans (for which there are notes in the Asian materials of this collection, boxes 19-22) are available in a separately cataloged collection in the Minnesota Historical Society's oral history collections under the heading: Asians in Minnesota Oral History Project (OH51).

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This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the Minnesota Historical Society. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should search the catalog using these headings.

Topics:

African Americans -- Minnesota.

Americanization.

Arab Americans -- Minnesota.

Armenian Americans -- Minnesota.

Belgian Americans -- Minnesota.

British Americans -- Minnesota.

Cambodian Americans -- Minnesota.

Canadian Americans -- Minnesota.

Chinese Americans -- Minnesota.

Cornish -- Minnesota.

Czech Americans -- Minnesota.

Dakota Indians -- Minnesota.

Danish Americans -- Minnesota.

Demographic surveys.

Discrimination -- Minnesota.

Dutch Americans -- Minnesota.

Egyptians -- Minnesota.

Estonian Americans -- Minnesota.

Ethnic groups -- Minnesota -- Indexes.

Ethnic groups -- Minnesota -- Religion.

Ethnic groups -- Minnesota -- Research.

Filipino Americans -- Minnesota.

Finnish Americans -- Minnesota.

French Americans -- Minnesota.

French Canadians -- Minnesota.

German Americans -- Minnesota.

Greek Americans -- Minnesota.

Hispanic Americans -- Minnesota.

History -- Minnesota -- Research

History -- Statistical methods.

Hmong Americans -- Minnesota.

Hungarian Americans -- Minnesota.

Icelandic Americans -- Minnesota.

Immigrants -- Minnesota.

Indochinese -- Minnesota.

Iranian Americans -- Minnesota.

Irish Americans -- Minnesota.

Italian Americans -- Minnesota.

Japanese Americans -- Minnesota.

Jews -- Minnesota.

Korean Americans -- Minnesota.

Laotian Americans -- Minnesota.

Latvian Americans -- Minnesota.

Lebanese Americans -- Minnesota.

Lithuanian Americans -- Minnesota.

Luxembourg Americans -- Minnesota.

Métis -- Minnesota.

Mexican Americans -- Minnesota.

Migration, Internal -- United States.

Minnesota -- Ethnic relations.

Minorities -- Minnesota.

Norwegian Americans -- Minnesota.

Ojibwa Indians -- Minnesota.

Palestinian Arabs -- Minnesota.

Polish Americans -- Minnesota.

Research -- Management.

Romanian Americans -- Minnesota.

Russian Americans -- Minnesota.

Scandinavian Americans -- Minnesota.

Scots-Irish -- Minnesota.

Scottish Americans -- Minnesota.

Slovak Americans -- Minnesota.

Swedish Americans -- Minnesota.

Swiss Americans -- Minnesota

Syrian Americans -- Minnesota.

Turkish Americans -- Minnesota.

Ukrainian Americans -- Minnesota.

United States -- Census.

United States -- Emigration and Immigration.

Vietnamese Americans -- Minnesota.

Welsh Americans -- Minnesota.

Yugoslav Americans -- Minnesota.

Persons:

De Gryse, Louis Mathieu.

Diebold, Susan M.

Fridley, Russell W.

Holmquist, June Drenning.

Hoover, Marjorie A., 1928-.

Mason, Sarah R.

Persons:

Miller, Deborah L., 1948-.

Qualey, Carlton C., 1904-1988.

Renkiewicz, Frank, 1935-.

Saloutos, Theodore.

Organization:

Immigration History Society (U.S.).

Organization of American Historians.

Types of Documentation:

Charts.

Interviews.

Population maps.

Occupation:

Historians.

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