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The Mall of America is one of Minnesota’s most well-known attractions. Now entering its fourth decade, the largest indoor shopping center in the country draws visitors from around the world to the Twin Cities suburb of Bloomington.
In its early years, the Miss America pageant was just a beauty contest, a straightforward competition between eager young women with curvaceous figures and pretty faces. Baldly exploitative, gleefully sexist — it knew what it was about.
As it grew more popular, it sought respectability. Miss America was packaged as
