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"Outside of the death of one’s own child, I think sending a boy to war would be the most difficult."
—Marialyse Hager Knobel
Fairbury High School Student
What happened to Corporal William E. Green is one of the many stories of a mother experiencing both the anxiety of sending her son to war, and then, the pain of losing him there. Bill Green was in Europe only a few months before he was killed at the Siegfried Line between Luxemburg and Germany on ... Read more
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During the Cold War, military planners assumed that the Soviet Union might start a nuclear war at any time. Initially, the attack would have come from bombers flying over the North Pole, which is the shortest route between Russia and the U.S. SAC built a string of radar stations across Alaska, Canada and Scotland to provide about one hour of warning. Then ICBMs — Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles that could fly from continent to continent in minutes — were developed, and ... Read more
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The first rumblings of the 1980s’ farm crisis came in the 1970s. In the early years of the decade, prices for farm products were relatively high. In 1973, farmers across the nation had a total net income of $33 billion. By 1977, record crops had pushed prices down, and the cost of fuel, seed, pesticides and other farm costs had risen — net farm income dropped to $20 billion. In addition, the value of farm land — the "equity" or ... Read more
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The Posse Comitatus was a right-wing extremist group that contended that the true intent of the country’s founders was to establish a Christian republic where the individual was sovereign, and that the Republic’s first duty was to promote, safeguard, and protect the Christian faith. They saw farmers as the victims of a Jewish-led, communist-supported conspiracy that had infiltrated the government. They thought the conspiracy would rob the farmer of his land through manipulation of ... Read more
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Initiative 300, the anti-corporate farming amendment, passed in 1982. The farm crisis that had begun during the late 1970s deepened in the ’80s. The prices being bid for agricultural land dropped. Opponents of I-300 were quick to argue this was partially because corporations were no longer allowed to bid for farmland in Nebraska. Supporters of Initiative 300 responded that the amendment was doing exactly what it was intended to do — keep corporations from snapping up Nebraska farm and ranch ... Read more
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You may think names such as Quality Pig, Inc., Profit Pig, Inc., Pork Chop, Inc., and Oink, Inc. are names given to corporate hog factories by their critics. But, the names were no laughing matter to Nebraska’s pork industry, which ibecame increasingly dominated by large-scale confinement hog factories in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Good hog prices, lucrative tax breaks, and in some cases, government financing brought a flurry of non-farmer investments in Nebraska hog confinement facilities prior to ... Read more
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The first accepted evidence we have of human beings on the Central Plains is around 12,000 years old. Archaeologists have found spear points near Clovis, New Mexico, and elsewhere that date from that era.There is some evidence that human beings may have lived here even earlier, but that evidence is disputed. Most scientists believe the ancestors of today’s Native Americans walked across a "land bridge" from Asia to ... Read more
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It is easy for most of us to become a citizen of the United States. For most U.S. citizens, ... Read more
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In the 1930s, the United States was suffering through the Great Depression. In Nebraska and surrounding states, the effects of the economic depression were made worse by sustained drought. Farmers were being driven from their land by crop failures that were common in the “Dust Bowl” that spread across the Great Plains.
Nebraska had a history of drought. Most of Nebraska was once called the “Great American Desert”. Its scorching summers, harsh ... Read more
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There was already a war going on in Europe. After Germany invaded the former Soviet Union in June 1941, the United States joined Great Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and several others to become the Allied Powers. We promised aid to the Soviet Union to resist Germany.
Germany was part of the enemy we called the Axis Powers, along with Italy, and later Japan. Together, they signed the Tripartite Pact ...
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Within days of the declaration of war, troops began to move across the country, on their way to the front lines. In many ... Read more
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The Enola Gay certainly became World War II’s most famous airplane when it dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima August 6, 1945. It was built in Omaha. The B-29 Superfortress bomber was the single most complicated and expensive airplane produced by the United States during World War II.
The Enola Gay was specially modified for its mission and was handpicked from the assembly line in Omaha by the ... Read more
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On September 18, 1945, the last of 531 Omaha-produced B-29s rolled out of the final assembly hall of the Martin Plant. On April 1, 1946, the Martin Company’s last 100 workers left the plant. The bomber plant was used for storage of machine tools from 1946 to 1948. Fort Crook, which was where the ... Read more
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The Oto tribe gave this state its name, but they were not native to the region. "Nebraska" is an Oto word that means "flat water." Like migrant groups before and after, the Oto immigrated to the Central Plains from the east, just ahead of the Europeans.
The earliest mention of the Oto and Missouria tribes in the European historical record dates from the late 1600s. The Missouria were then in central Missouri and the Oto were in central Iowa. The Otos ... Read more
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A black man by the name of York accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition as a slave to Clark. He had been a childhood companion to William Clark and made invaluable contributions to the expedition on many occasions. Clark reported that York was especially attentive to Sergeant Floyd during his final days. York also risked his life to save Clark in a flash flood on the Missouri River near Great Falls in present-day Montana.
York participated in the hunts to bring ... Read more
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President Jefferson had expected Lewis to take the raw notes and maps of their journey and craft them into a polished “scientific” account that could be used by other explorers and later, settlers. Lewis, however, made little progress on this task before his untimely death in 1809. Therefore, the bulk of the work on the journals and maps fell on Clark who had been named the Governor of the Missouri Territory. From his office in St. Louis, Clark compiled and ... Read more
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From 1778 to 1871, the U.S. federal government tried to determine its relationship with the various Native tribes by creating treaties. There were hundreds of these treaties, which were formal agreements between two independent nations. So Native American people were citizens of their tribe, living within the boundaries of the U.S. The Native tribes would give up their rights to hunt and live on huge pieces of land in exchange for trade goods, yearly cash payments, and promises that no ... Read more
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This tangle of economics resulted in a shortage of beef. That, in turn, created a lucrative black market for beef.
The black market avoided price controls at every level of production. Unscrupulous cattle buyers paid ranchers more for cattle that they bought straight from the fields, thus avoiding public sales and inevitable price ceilings. Packers bought the extra cattle, butchered them, and then offered them to meat markets with empty shelves. They asked for the ceiling price plus some extra money ... Read more
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Nebraska’s geography was responsible for one of the major economic and social developments of the war. From border to border, the Army built a dozen air bases — far from the coasts. Ainsworth, Alliance, Bruning, Fairmont, Fort Crook, Grand Island, Harvard, Kearney, Lincoln, McCook, Scottsbluff, and Scribner all got air bases or satellite airfields during World War II.
Even before the war, in September 1940, President Roosevelt’s Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense (NDAC) was looking for possible army ... Read more
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Throughout the war, Nebraskans were constantly bombarded with propaganda to help keep morale high, and those on the front lines were bombarded with propaganda intended to beat morale down.
"We were all the good guys. We did everything right and the Germans and the Japs, they looked awful and they sneered and they said lousy things. They were bad! It was really propaganda. I just accepted it. What else did I know?"
— Rose Marie Murphy Christensen, Columbus, grade school student.
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