The Minnesota Historical Society Library will be closed Thursday December 25 and Thursday January 1.

The Library is open:

• Wednesday December 24 only until 3:00 p.m.  
• Friday December 26 from 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
• Saturday December 27 from 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.  “I’m New Here” class at 9:15.
• Tuesday December 30 from noon - 8:00 p.m.
• Wednesday December 31 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
• Friday January 2 from 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
• Saturday January 3 from 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.  “I’m New Here” class at 9:15.

As the U.S. drew close to joining World War II in 1941, a few military officers—notably Lt. Col. John Weckerling and Capt. Kai Rasmussen—realized that there would be a need for Japanese translators in the Pacific. Unfortunately, the military could only find a few soldiers already proficient in Japanese, so Weckerling and Rasmussen began to push for the creation of a language school to intensively train people to be military linguists.

Weckerling and Rasmussen put their jobs on the line and got the 4th Army Intelligence School opened in San Francisco on November 1, 1941, where John Aiso, Shigeya Kihara, Akira Oshida, and Tetsuo Imagawa taught fifty-eight Nisei and two Caucasians. A few months later President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that forced the internment or relocation of Japanese families. Because the school was housing Nisei, it had to move or lose nearly all of its students. After a number of other mid-western states declined, Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota agreed to take in the school, so it moved to Camp Savage and changed its name to the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS).

Within a couple of years, the school outgrew itself and moved again, this time to Fort Snelling in St. Paul. Eventually MISLS graduated more than 6,000 linguists. Its graduates broke codes, served on the front lines, and even became instructors themselves. Their service in the Pacific theater of World War II was so successful that it prompted Major General Charles Willoughby—General Douglas MacArthur’s Chief of Staff for Military Intelligence—to say, “The Nisei shortened the Pacific War by two years and saved possibly a million American lives and saved probably billions of dollars.”

The Minnesota Historical Society Library has a number of primary and secondary resources about this topic. Check it out in the Minnesota History Topics: Military Intelligence Service Language School at Fort Snelling.

Bruce Laingen was the senior U.S. diplomat held in Tehran during the Iran Hostage Crisis from November 1979 to January 1981.

He received a M.A. in International Relations from the University of Minnesota. During World War II Laingen served in the U.S. Navy, and in 1949 he joined the U.S. Foreign Service. He served until 1987 at posts in Germany, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. He was appointed ambassador to Malta in 1977. Laingen was then sent back to Iran as the U.S. chargé d’affaires, but within months of his arrival the U.S. embassy was overrun by student protesters. He and two other American officials were at the Iranian Foreign Ministry at the time of the assault and were trapped and held there for the next 14 months. After his ordeal, Laingen was awarded the State Department’s Award for Valor along with several other recognitions.

Ambassador Laingen’s papers are at the Minnesota Historical Society. They are a valuable resource for anyone interested in international relations, U.S.-Iran relations, diplomacy, the U.S. Foreign Service, and especially the Iran Hostage Crisis. The papers contain personal and official correspondence and photographs from his entire Foreign Service career, and papers from Laingen’s experience during the Iran hostage crisis. Highlights include appeals written by Laingen to Iranian government officials, letters written to Laingen by children, personal and official correspondence, pages from Laingen’s journal kept during the crisis, solitary confinement writings, and a map of the ministry rooms, drawn by Laingen, where he was kept hostage.

Historians estimate that 12.5 million people crossed the Atlantic from Africa as part of the slave trace. A new, free web database called Voyages might be able to help you find your African ancestors.

Voyages, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, was just launched on December 5, 2008. It has “information on almost 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It offers researchers, students, and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.”

On the website you can:

• Search the Voyages Database: Look for particular voyages in this database of documented slaving expeditions. Create listings, tables, charts, and maps using information from the database.
• Examine Estimates of the Slave Trade: Slaves on documented voyages represent four-fifths of the number who were actually transported. Use the interactive estimates page to analyze the full volume and multiple routes of the slave trade.
• Explore the African Names Database: This database identifies over 67,000 Africans aboard slave ships, using name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation.

Special features on the site include introductory maps and a timeline/chronology.

Who was Lawrence Taliaferro (pronounced “toll-i-ver”), you ask?

The United States gained control over the upper Mississippi Valley through the Revolutionary War with Great Britain and later the Louisiana Purchase from France. This vast territory, inhabited by fur traders and Indians still loyal to the British in Canada, lay well beyond American settlement. After the War of 1812, the government took physical possession of the valuable Northwest frontier by establishing a chain of Indian agencies and supporting forts from Lake Michigan to the Missouri River. The story of Fort Snelling is the story of the development of the U.S. Northwest.  

Near Fort Snelling, at the St. Peter’s Agency, Major Lawrence Taliaferro mediated disputes between Minnesota’s Dakota (Sioux) and Ojibwe (Chippewa or Anishinabe) Indians. He attempted to ease tensions between both tribes, the fur traders, and their new white neighbors.

Taliaferro presided over the drafting of a treaty in 1837. He brought Dakota leaders to Washington, D.C., and negotiated what he thought were fair terms for Dakota lands east of the Mississippi River. Unfortunately, the United States government was unable to keep up its end of the bargain. The Indians ended up debt-ridden and desperate for their means of survival, and Taliaferro became increasingly critical of the United States’ inability to make good on their promises. In poor health, he resigned his position.

Taliaferro was also, notably, the owner of a slave named Harriet Robinson, who would later marry Dred Scott. It is unknown exactly how Taliaferro came into ownership of Harriet, but what is known is that she worked as a servant to his wife. As Justice of the Peace in the territories, Taliferro would officiate the marriage of Dred and Harriet, a marriage which many historians believe gave additional credence to the Scotts’ claim to freedom.

Lawrence Taliaferro’s papers are in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society Library, as well as other materials, including a painting of Major Taliaferro.