The spring 2025 issue of South Dakota History, the quarterly journal of the South Dakota State Historical Society, features articles on women inmates during the early years of the South Dakota State Penitentiary, German-language theater in Sioux Falls, and the establishment of the EROS Data Center in South Dakota.
In "Life in a 'Cubby Hole': Accommodations for Women at the South Dakota State Penitentiary, 1885–1932," Lisa R. Lindell, catalog librarian at the Hilton M. Briggs Library at South Dakota State University, details the changing conditions women experienced while incarcerated at the South Dakota penitentiary during its early years. Despite the difficulties of confinement—from dealing with inadequate accommodations to encountering biased and dismissive treatment—these women were able to forge close ties and offer one another support.
Next is "'A Great Day Among German-Americans': The Germania Verein and German Theater in Sioux Falls around 1900," in which Istvan Gombocz, professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota, chronicles the vibrant German-language theater scene in Sioux Falls during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sioux Falls was home to a German community whose cultural life centered on the organization Germania Verein, which backed German cultural events and plays at Germania Hall on West Ninth Street.
And finally, in "'Whatever is Required, We Will Do!': How EROS Arrived in South Dakota," Michael J. Mullin, professor of history at Augustana University, explores the history of how the U.S. Geological Survey's EROS (Earth Resources Observation and Science) Data Center landed north of Sioux Falls. Mullin writes of the competition between political figures who vied for this important institution to be established in their state, and how the center, which collects and maintains NASA's Landsat satellite data, has become the largest civilian collection of land images of the Earth's surface over the last fifty years.