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3/27/2012: North Dakota’s reputation as a low-crime state is more than an anecdotal source of pride. But no state, even North Dakota, is free from major crime. For a small number of those crimes, justice can prove elusive.

4/5/2012: Arthur LeSueur of Minot had a real talent for stirring up controversy in 1911. LeSueur was a reformer who wanted to clean up the city. His goal was to shut down illegal gambling dens. He wanted to close all saloons in Minot, which were unlawful. LeSueur also wished to eliminate bawdy houses of prostitution, then rampant in Minot. He also stirred up emotions because he was a Socialist.

4/9/2012: Dawn had just broken the morning of April 9, 1865. Union forces had finally maneuvered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia into the place chosen for a final showdown. Leading the Third Cavalry, General George Armstrong Custer stood at the advance, awaiting word to proceed against the Confederate cavalry. General Lee’s army was trapped.

4/11/2012: Along Gateway Drive in Grand Forks lies the city’s cemetery ground with rows of granite and marble gravestones. The most forlorn portion of the burial grounds must be Potter’s Field, where the local government provided graves for poor, elderly and ill people who died without any relatives to pay for their burial. On this date in 1911, the Grand Forks Herald reported on the Memorial Park Cemetery Association’s purchase of a half-acre of land for use as a potter’s field.

4/13/2012: Discovering the tracks of a giant, unknown beast is a staple of monster stories. Fear can be heightened in that situation if one has an imagined notion of the ferocity of the being that left the tracks.

4/15/2012: Call it “The tax man waiteth” – a late-comers dream made true. Time didn’t exactly stand still a year ago today, but it did slow down the income tax deadline for procrastinators and made for a special North Dakota week.

5/1/2012: For many years there has been a key “go to” print source for information about North Dakota’s past. North Dakotans, with either a casual or intense curiosity about the heritage and historical perspective of their state, have benefited from Dr. Elwyn B. Robinson’s “The History of North Dakota” since its publication in 1966.

5/4/2012: It’s spring. The trees are budding, the flowers blossoming, the prairies blooming with emerald life. And children, long cooped up behind their brown and tan desks are eagerly anticipating the wondrous joy of the three months of glorious freedom shortly to come. Teachers – for their part – are likewise looking forward to the respite after the school year’s cacophony. Yet eighty years ago,in the two-room schoolhouse of Sims, North Dakota one young teacher daydreamed not about the freedom of the upcoming summer, but of the mysteries of germ theory.

5/12/2012: The Orin G. Libby papers were deposited into UND’s Chester Fritz Library on this date in 1957. The donation from Eva, Libby’s widow, represents the collection of letters, manuscripts, academic publications and holdings of one of North Dakota’s greatest historians.

5/15/2012: The joining of sound and picture had been in experimentation for many years before, but when the first well-known “talkie,” “The Jazz Singer,” was produced and shown in 1927, the movies were changed forever.