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1/9/2009: Religion has always played an important role throughout the history of North Dakota. As early as 1780, Jesuit missionaries were administering to the inhabitants of the Red River Valley. When the area was settled in the Nineteenth Century, the religious practices of these immigrants came with them, and churches were built in the larger communities and on the Indian reservations.

1/11/2009: In Bismarck, on the second floor of the Bank of North Dakota, sat a big green box-a locked steel filing case. No one knew what the box held, if it held anything.

1/16/2009: In 1908 in Devils Lake, Christ Dahl, one of the owners of the I X L clothing store, and Ed Thompson, a painter, had come to a conclusion. They needed money. So, they came up with a plan to help make ready their road to riches. It was not exactly legal, but it was, apparently, the only way: they had to set fire to the store, and collect the insurance money.

1/23/2009: North Dakota was an up and coming state in 1907. Additional lands had been opened for homesteading, and the journalist field was crowded with newly ordained newspapers. Across the state, publications such as the Barlow Enterprise, the Lankin Journal, the Oriska Post, the Mott Pioneer Press, the Jud Leader and the Marmath Mail, were among forty newly established newspapers. But on this date, a curious little newspaper, known as the "Sheyenne Blizzard," was to suddenly appear and just as suddenly vanish amid the snow-covered fields of a wintery 1907.

1/24/2009: Almost any child will express excitement at the prospect of snow; and almost any school-aged student looks forward to the possibility of missing school if it snows too heavily. However, on this date in 1951, snow-covered roads proved to be no problem for at least a few young children

1/28/2009: In 1908, a group of 15 bachelors living in Anamoose banded together in an attempt to do something about it. They called themselves the Roosevelt Bachelor's club, and they made it their goal to find themselves a sweetie.

2/2/2009: Back in the 1920s, a Bismarck trolley car was named after a popular newspaper cartoon that was in syndication between 1908 and 1955. The cartoon was called variously Toonerville Folks or Toonerville Trolley.

2/3/2009: It was this date in 1989 that the Falkirk Mining Company donated a bit of land high on a bluff overlooking a small lake in McLean County to the state of North Dakota. At first glance there isn’t anything special about the place.

2/4/2009: In 1912, Englishman Jack Judge became famous when his song, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” flew from the Grand Theatre in Stalybridge, Cheshire, England, where he performed it, to the trenches of the first world war. It was adopted by the soldiers of Great Britain as their battle song and was heard across the war torn fields, becoming familiar to the French, the Belgians, the Americans and even, it was said, to the Germans and Russians.

2/6/2009: At the beginning of February in 1908, six to eighteen inches of snow fell throughout the east portion of the state in just 48 hours. It was the heaviest of the winter, a situation old-timers recognized as just right for a blizzard had the winds picked up.