“Professor Berman: The Last Lecture of Minnesota’s Greatest Historian” (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is another collection of surprisingly evocative historical research notes. This book is nominally about Hy Berman, Minnesota’s leading historian of the late 20th Century. But it was written jointly by Berman and Minnesota author Jay Weiner, the latter of which had only a year to work with Berman before editing the final volume after his death. Berman holds an interesting role in Minnesota history. A New Yorker, he knew relatively little about the state when he arrived to take a job at the University of Minnesota. The son of radical labor activists in Brooklyn, Berman would soon connect with a dentist in Hibbing named Rudy Perpich.

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