Minneapolis

The Dakota are the original people of this land, and one widely told story says they emerged at Bdóte, where the Minnesota River meets the Mississippi; in 1680 the cleric Louis Hennepin renamed the waterfall they called Owámniyomni the Falls of St. Anthony. The US Army built Fort Snelling near the confluence from 1819, and under a series of treaties the Dakota were pressed to cede their land on both sides of the river. When owed payments were late in 1862 and the Dakota faced starvation, war broke out; afterwards 38 Dakota men were hanged, 1,700 non-combatants were held in a camp at Fort Snelling, and most Dakota were exiled from Minnesota.

Settlers claimed both banks of the falls, and the towns of St. Anthony and Minneapolis — a name joining the Dakota word for water, mni, with the Greek polis — merged in 1872 to use its power. Sawmills and flour mills made "Mill City" the world's leader: in 1884 its flour milling was the most valuable on earth, and in 1899 it sold more lumber than any other market. Washburn-Crosby, which became General Mills, and Pillsbury grew here. Lumbering declined around the turn of the century, and the milling era later waned.

The population peaked at about 522,000 in 1950, and urban renewal later destroyed about 40 per cent of downtown, including the Gateway District. The American Indian Movement was founded here in 1968. In 2020 the murder of George Floyd by a police officer set off protests across the country and beyond. From December 2025 a federal immigration enforcement operation deployed about 3,000 agents in the state, and in January 2026 two people were killed by federal agents.

Minneapolis supports an unusually large arts scene. The Guthrie Theater, founded in 1963 with a thrust stage surrounded by the audience on three sides, is often called the granddaddy of American regional theatre, and the city bought and restored the Orpheum, State and Pantages vaudeville houses on Hennepin Avenue. The Walker Art Center and its Sculpture Garden, the free Minneapolis Institute of Art and Frank Gehry's Weisman museum anchor the visual arts, and the Northeast arts district holds some 400 independent artists.

Music is a point of pride. Prince was born here, and in the 1980s First Avenue made the city a centre of underground rock alongside R&B, funk and soul, with Hüsker Dü and The Replacements. Sport follows the Twins, who won the World Series in 1987 and 1991, the Vikings, the Timberwolves, the Lynx and the University of Minnesota's Golden Gophers.

The city's heritage is German, Irish, Norwegian and Swedish, kept alive at the American Swedish Institute, and newer communities have changed it: about 20,000 Somalis live in Minneapolis, the Somali Museum of Minnesota opened on Lake Street in 2013, and since 2022 the Muslim call to prayer may be broadcast five times a day. Dakota presence is being restored too — five acres around the falls are due to pass to a Dakota-led nonprofit in 2026. Life outdoors follows the seasons: the lakes in summer, and skating, ice fishing and cross-country skiing in winter.

Minneapolis had 429,954 residents at the 2020 census — about 430,000 — and the Twin Cities metropolitan area about 3.69 million. Over half of adult residents hold a bachelor's degree, well above the national average, but almost 17 per cent lived in poverty in 2023, and gaps in income and home ownership between White and Black families remain wide.

The economy is built on headquarters, finance, health care and education. Target and U.S. Bancorp are among five Fortune 500 companies based in the city, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis serves the upper Midwest, and the metro area has one of the highest concentrations of large corporate headquarters in the country. Medical technology grew from Medtronic, founded in a Minneapolis garage in 1949, and the University of Minnesota enrolls more than 45,000 students on its Twin Cities campus.

Winter shapes daily routine: office workers move through the skyways, and public works crews plough snow for months. Housing has been a long-running debate, and in 2024 the state legislature approved the city's 2040 plan for denser zoning after years of court battles. Jacob Frey has been mayor since 2018.

The city's own invention is the Jucy Lucy, a burger with the cheese sealed inside the patty so that it melts as it cooks. Two bars in south Minneapolis, Matt's Bar and the 5-8 Club, both claim to have created it and have served it since the 1950s.

Minnesota's lakes and Scandinavian past shape much of the rest. Walleye and wild rice are favourite Minnesota ingredients; the hotdish, a casserole often topped with tater tots, is everyday comfort food; and lutefisk, dried whitefish treated with lye and introduced by Scandinavians, is still eaten. The Minnesota State Fair, between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, is as much about eating as anything else.

Minneapolis also has a serious restaurant scene, with several winners of the James Beard awards. Owamni, run by the chef Sean Sherman by the Mississippi, cooks only with Indigenous ingredients — game, corn and wild plants — and has won a James Beard award. Some twenty farmers markets operate across the city, four of them in winter, and East African cuisine arrived with the Somali migrants of the 1990s.