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Between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of Omaha doubled from around 5,000 to 10,315. Those 10,000 blacks made up five percent of Omaha’s population. Blacks made up only around one percent of the population of the state. Even with these small numbers, the rate ... Read more
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When homesteaders arrived on the Great Plains, they found a challenging environment where survival was the goal. The native tribal people had been meeting these same challenges for thousands of years and had evolved complex economic, agricultural and cultural methods of coping. What was life like for the Native Americans in the mid- to late-1800s on the Great Plains?
By the mid-1800s, the Pawnee, Omaha, Oto-Missouria, Ponca, Lakota (Sioux), and Cheyenne were the main plains tribes living in the Nebraska Territory. ... Read more
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What is it like to be born and raised an American, but to be considered an enemy because of where your parents were born? That’s what happened to many Japanese Americans in World War II.
Racism and war hysteria motivated the U.S. government to forcibly move more than 120,000 Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans from their homes on the west coast to internment camps between 1942 and 1945. Nebraska’s central location kept its Japanese American citizens comparably safe from this process, ... Read more
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One horrible by-product of war is that crimes against humanity sometimes occur away from the battlefields. A very sad example was the creation of concentration camps by Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist political party. Racist, nationalistic, imperialistic, anti-communist, and militaristic, the "Nazis" claimed that Jewish people were members of an "inferior race".
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Behind the scenes of this racial situation was a political machine that may have contributed to one of the most ugly incidents in Nebraska history. In the first two decades of the 20th Century, Omaha had acquired the reputation of a "wide open" city controlled by a political machine run by Tom Dennison. In 1910, one estimate put the number of prostitutes in the city at 2,500 women. Dennison was a professional gambler who had little education or social standing. ... Read more
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"I remember once in a difficult part of the war that these MPs made the patients (German prisoners of war) think that they were not going to give them food from the carts. . . . I cried and said, ‘Oh, you can’t deprive them.’ This (guard) said, ‘Oh, we’re just kidding.’ But I know they weren’t. They were angry with the Germans."
—Barbara Gier, Seward, NE
Nurse, 203 General Hospital in Paris
World War II lasted over three and a half years ... Read more
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There were many Native American tribes living on the Great Plains, competing for scarce resources. Of course, the various tribes came into conflict with each other.
The Lakota (or Sioux) is actually a broad group of people that includes the seven bands of the Western (or Teton) Lakota, the Dakota (Yankton and Yanktoni) and the Nakota (Santee). This group of tribes lived in the Plains for only a part of their known history. The Lakotas originally lived in the northern woodlands. ... Read more
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Notable Nebraskan, Susan La Flesche Picotte was born on the Omaha reservation in northeastern Nebraska on June 17, 1865. She became the first Native American to earn a medical degree.
Susan’s father, Joseph La Flesche, also known as Iron Eye, was the last recognized chief of the Omaha. He had a big impact on Susan’s life. He encouraged his people, especially his children, ... Read more
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Notable Nebraskan, George William Norris was born near Clyde, Ohio, on July 11, 1861. Norris’ father died when he was four years old — only months after George’s older brother had died in the Civil War. Norris was the 11th child of a very poor family of farmers. George’s mother, Mary, encouraged him to continue his education to help him ... Read more
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The Oto and Missouria have left impressive archaeological sites, including the Oto-Missouria village near Yutan.
The Otos immigrated into eastern Nebraska about 1700, building the Yutan village about 1775; remnants of the Missourias joined them in the 1790s.The village was occupied until 1837. It was the first major Indian settlement seen by fur traders on the journey up the Platte to western bison-hunting and beaver-trapping ranges. Spanish correspondence from 1777 noted the presence of this site that was named after the ... Read more
