Barbara Flanagan Papers

The Barbara Flanagan Papers contain a wide array of materials on the professional and personal life of Star Tribune columnist, author, and socialite Barbara Flanagan. The collection holds personal papers, documents, records, scrapbooks, notes, drafts, interview transcripts, extensive personal correspondence and reader letters, photocopies of Flanagan’s columns, research materials, club and organization materials, press releases and event invitations, awards and plaques, honors, magazine and newspaper clippings, assorted ephemera, photographs, slides, and audio-visual materials.

The bulk of the materials pertain to Barbara Flanagan’s career as a journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune and Star Tribune. This includes correspondence with readers, research notes, columns, drafts, and awards. These materials are richest from 1965 to 1988. Materials reflect Flanagan’s interests in urban design, historic preservation, local celebrities, local and national politics, and cultural institutions. The columns and scrapbooks are a good point of access to the collection, as correspondence is often tied to specific columns.

The collection contains materials pertaining to Barbara Flanagan’s early life in Des Moines, Iowa, her time at Roosevelt High School and Drake University in the 1940s, and her early career as a journalist at the Minneapolis Times. Additionally, it contains materials from Flanagan’s parents, grandparents, and other ancestors.

The collection also contains research materials, correspondence, writings, drafts, and published columns and books pertaining to a broad range of topics, interests, and events that Barbara Flanagan both covered as a journalist and was involved in as a private citizen. These topics include: urban planning and design, revitalization and beautification efforts in Downtown Minneapolis, historic preservation, her extensive travels, celebrities, British and Scandinavian royalty, local, state, and national politics, various goings-on about town, the arts and culture, local human interest stories, and Minnesota history.

The collection also contains materials pertaining to Flanagan’s membership in various clubs and organizations and decades-long philanthropic involvement and patronage of local arts and culture, including with the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, American Swedish Institute, and Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library.

Additionally, copies of Flanagan’s columns, investigative pieces, human-interest stories, dispatches as women’s editor, and other articles are represented, spanning over six decades, from the beginning of her newspaper career in 1947 to the cessation of her post-retirement column, the Flanagan Memo, in 2012.

Extensive correspondence, both personal and professional, spanning eight decades, including her entire career at the Star and Tribune, is also represented in the collection. The bulk of this correspondence consists of reader letters, as well as invitations and press releases sent to Flanagan.

The collection also contains various awards, honors, plaques, and certificates presented to Flanagan over the years, as well as event invitations, menus, and other ephemera from balls, formal dinners, state functions, and royal visits.

Finally, the collection also holds forty-two scrapbooks compiled by Flanagan over the course of many decades. Most contain copies of all of Flanagan’s bylines, mostly columns, while some hold photographs, letters, notes, and other personal ephemera.