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12/1/2012: World War I was at an end, but the shortages it created were slow to recover. Anthracite coal and oil were two of these commodities.

12/19/2012: From 1914 to 1922, the Nonpartisan League had a spectacular but stormy success by creating the presence of a third party in North Dakota. With the demise of the NPL, an unintended consequence was the alignment of the remnants of the League with the Republican Party, creating a virtual one-party system in the state.

12/21/2012: In the summer of 1906, racial tensions exploded throughout America over the Brownsville Raid. Members of the all-black 25thArmy Regiment stationed at Fort Brown, Texas, were falsely accused of killing one citizen and injuring two police officers in an unprovoked attack. In a miscarriage of justice, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the 167 black infantrymen dishonorably discharged, including six Medal of Honor recipients.

12/23/2012: The Dakota Bill was an attempt to divide Dakota Territory along the forty-sixth parallel and admit the southern part of the territory as a state.

12/26/2012: Player organs and pianos were fairly common near the end of the Nineteenth Century. They used volumes of air to create musical notes or to open valves causing a note to be struck with a hammer. In the late 1890s the Saloon in Knox, North Dakota, obtained an interesting musical device to attract customers, but unlike the others, this device produced music with a plucking motion such as found in a music box.

12/27/2012: The names of the newspapers over the history of North Dakota have been quite varied. There have been the celestial names such as the Churches Ferry Sun, the Hannah Moon, the Aneta Star and Burnstad Comet. There have been the progressive sounding names such as the Saint John Leader, the Halliday Booster and the Prairie Promoter out of Cooperstown. There have been many conventional names such as the Haynes Gazette, the Inkster Review, the Hunter Times or the Landsford Journal. There have also been some unconventional names such as the Hamilton X-Ray, the Alice Avalanche, the Fargo Blade, the Pink Paper out of Bathgate or the Loco Weed out of Schafer.

12/28/2012: When the land in North Dakota was first made available, thousand of homesteaders flooded in to file claims. After filing on a piece of land, the homesteader had to plow so many acres per year and meet some other requirements, one of which was to live on the land for a period of five years. Being a male-dominated society at the time, most of those who came were men, and many were single. Few women came to homestead on their own because it was believed that a woman’s place was in the home, cleaning and cooking. However, the drawback of this male-dominated society was that most of these single men couldn’t cook.

1/2/2013: North Dakota Governor William Lewis Guy left office on this date in 1973, nearly twelve years after he first began his tenure in 1961. Serving two two-year terms and two four-year terms, Guy remains the state’s longest-serving governor.

1/6/2013: On this date in 1951, legislators were upset because they had to compete with State Employees to find good parking places near the Capitol. So, a legislative committee approached the Board of Administration with the complaint.

1/8/2013: "Gold.” The mere mention of the word sets pulses pounding and hearts longing for the glistening yellow metal. When a landowner finds flecks of gold on his land, he hopes for bigger flakes, or golden nuggets, or even the mother lode. Such a landowner was H.W. Griswold, a Chicago businessman, who bought 340 acres of Ransom County land, nine miles west of the fledgling town of Lisbon in the spring of 1883.