Guide to Digitized Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society
The Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society is a 17 volume serial publication of the Minnesota Historical Society issued from 1872 to 1920.
The Collections contain primary and early secondary sources on the history of Minnesota and the American Midwest. Subjects include Dakota, Ojibwe, and indigenous peoples’ history; the Canadian borderlands; métis history; state environmental history and geography; settler colonial narratives; accounts of local industries such as fur trading, logging, milling, shipping, and mining; histories of state institutions; and biographies of notable Minnesotans.
Full text digital facsimiles of the Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society are available online at the Internet Archive, as copyright on these works has expired. Unfortunately, the Internet Archive does not provide an easy way to browse among volumes in the series. In lieu of an authoritative catalog, the table below contains links to digital versions of every volume in the Collections. It is not a complete record of every copy held by the Internet Archive, but it provides at least one link for every volume.
List of Online Volumes
| Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society at Internet Archive | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Publication | Contributing Library | ||||
| Volume | Date | Other Titles/Editions | U. Toronto | U. Michigan | Allen Co. Library |
| 1 | 1872 | Annals of the Minnesota Historical Society: 1850-1856 | View | View | |
| 2 | 1889 | 3 Parts: 1860-1867 | View | View | |
| 3 | 1880 | 3 Parts: 1870-1880 | View | View | |
| 4 | 1876 | A History of the City of St. Paul | View | View | |
| 5 | 1885 | History of the Ojibway Nation | View | View | View |
| 6 | 1894 | 3 Parts: 1887-1894 | View | View | View |
| 7 | 1893 | The Mississippi River and its Source | View | View | |
| 8 | 1898 | 3 Parts: 1895-1898 | View | ||
| 9 | 1901 | View | View | View | |
| 10.1 | 1905 | Part 1 of 2 | View | View | View |
| 10.2 | 1905 | Part 2 of 2, Index to Vols 1-10 | View | View | View |
| 11 | 1904 | Itasca State Park: An Illustrated History | View | View | |
| 12 | 1908 | View | View | ||
| 13 | 1908 | Lives of the Governors of Minnesota | View | View | View |
| 14 | 1912 | Minnesota Biographies, 1655-1912 | View | View | |
| 15 | 1915 | View | View | ||
| 16 | 1913 | Part 1 of 1: The Weathering of Aboriginal Stone Artifacts, and A Consideration of the Paleoliths of Kansas | View | View | |
| 17 | 1920 | Minnesota Geographic Names | View | View | |
Other Resources
The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania also offers a partial list of Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, including some at the Internet Archive, Google Books, and the Library of Congress. Unfortunately it is missing several volumes.
Hathitrust has a more complete catalog record with additional digital contributors, but unlike the Internet Archive, it does not allow public downloads of full volumes. This makes it impossible to save Hathitrust’s Collections for offline reading or local searching and text analysis.
Find a Hard Copy
Find the Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society in a nearby library using their WorldCat record.