#Nebraska History

[terriblepersongreatseamonster]

Currently sitting here feeling very sad over what is possibly the most tragic love story I've ever heard.

For my volunteer job, I read for a couple different programs, one of which is called Bookshelf. Since we are located in Nebraska, the books on this program are by Nebraska authors and/or take place in Nebraska. Usually, I read fiction, but today I started a non-fiction book I've been planning to tackle for a while now. Evil Obsession by Nellie Snyder Yost.

The book mostly takes place on a farm that was located just outside the town I lived in during high school. It takes place starting in the late 1800s and tells the tale of Annie Cook, an extremely abusive, twisted, greedy woman.

Annie had a younger sister named Lizzie. When Lizzie was in her early twenties, her parents sent her to live with Annie. Annie was married to a farmer, Frank, and had a young daughter, Clara, (that she didn't love and did horrible things to).

When Lizzie moved in, she kept it secret that she'd met and was in communication with a man named Joe Knox. Joe lived in a town about 75 miles away, and had met Lizzie while she was still living with her parents in Denver. She and Joe wrote letters to each other, and he came for a very short visit right before Christmas. Fortunately, Annie, Frank, and Clara were away from the farm when Joe came by. When Joe learned just how much Annie abused Lizzie, he told Lizzie he'd be back in the spring so they could get married.

That spring, Lizzie escaped the farm on the day that Joe said he'd meet her at the courthouse in North Platte so they could get married. She did two of the miles on foot, but then a farmer stopped and offered her a ride.

Lizzie and Joe got married and he took her home to where his parents lived and ran a hotel. Not long after they got married, Annie showed up and tried to force Lizzie to leave Joe and come back to the farm. Lizzie refused, Annie got vicious, and Joe kicked Annie out threatening to get his gun if she didn't leave.

Annie only found out where Lizzie went because the farmer who gave Lizzie a ride was a neighbor and ended up telling Annie. Keep in mind that at the time almost no one knew how despicable Annie truly was. So, it's not a surprise that the farmer thought nothing of sharing that piece of information when Annie couldn't find Lizzie.

A couple years passed and Lizzie and Joe had a baby girl. The entire time, Annie had been plotting to try to get Lizzie back, but once the baby came Annie put her plotting on hold because she didn't like babies.

A few more years passed and Annie, deciding the baby was old enough to be of use, wrote and invited Lizzie and her little girl to come visit. Lizzie and Joe discussed it, and hoping Annie had really changed, Lizzie decided to go for the visit.

Annie had not changed. If anything, she was even worse than before.

As soon as Lizzie and her daughter were back in Annie's clutches, they couldn't escape. Joe came multiple times to try to get them back, even brought a lawyer at one point, but it was all futile. Annie had everyone else convinced she was a good woman, and knew that no one would be able to help Joe and Lizzie. The last time Joe came to try to get his family, Annie ran him off with a gun (details on this aren't very clear, but given other things Annie did, I have a theory that she may have shot him when forcing him to leave).

Lizzie's daughter escaped when she was old enough that Annie tried to force her to become a prostitute. (Side note: Annie ran a brothel and forced her own daughter to be one of the prostitutes.) Annie stabbed her and the girl ran away.

Lizzie never escaped, and was stuck with Annie until the day Annie died. After that Lizzie moved in with her now-adult daughter.

Joe never got Lizzie and their daughter back. They ended up divorced, due to abandonment.

I hope that when they died, Lizzie and Joe found each other and are now happy together, because they deserved a happily ever after and certainly didn't get it in this life.

[1900scartoons]

A Halloween Joke On Mr. Bryan

October 31, 1908

A pumpkin carved to resemble Roosevelt frightens Bryan. The startled Bryan drops the Lincoln Straw Vote.

The caption reads "William J.B. -- 'Oh, But That Gave Me A Start, But He's Not Running.'"

With the election days away, polls showed Bryan would likely lose his home state of Nebraska.

See Also: William Jennings Bryan; Theodore Roosevelt

From Hennepin County Library

Original available at: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/Bart/id/6800/rec/2117

[kriegsminister]

United States, 1989

A woman poses in front of a tornado (Nebraska)

-

[20th-century-railroading]

Grinding around Breezy Point by Mike Danneman Via Flickr: Four Burlington Northern GE C30-7s pull hard on a PSCX coal train rounding Breezy Point west of Belmont, Nebraska, on the climb over Crawford Hill on July 7, 1996. In the background on the other side of the horseshoe curve is the end of the train and a helper set of three EMD SD40-2 and a fuel tender.

[hooked-on-elvis]

FROM THE LAST TOUR...

June 20, 1977

At the Pershing Municipal Auditorium, Lincoln, NE. Concert time: 8:30 pm. Crowd: 7500.

Elvis wore the Mexican Sundial suit with the Original belt.

[blackjewels5]

[ophilosoraptoro]

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE [Banned Discovery Channel Documentary]

Before Epstein, there was Boys Town.

This documentary was pulled just before its broadcast date, in 1994. It was never aired.

[diemelusine]

Arnold Comes of Age (1930) by Grant Wood. Sheldon Museum of Art.

[vintagecamping]

Early morning on Platte River.

Nebraska

1985

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Langston Hughes]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 3, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 03, 2024

I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.

I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.

If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives. 

Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national. 

America would become a slaveholding nation. 

Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal. 

South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them. 

But that’s not how it played out. 

As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.

The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans. 

But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.  

The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.

In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.

By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence. 

In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.

Now it is our turn. 

In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power. 

And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong. 

On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future. 

I have had hope in these dark days because I look around at the extraordinary movement that has built in this country over the past several years, and it looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom. 

As always, the outcome is in our hands. 

“Fellow-citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”  

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ourstaturestouchtheskies]

The House by the Railroad - Edward Hopper // Sun Bleached Flies - Ethel Cain

Hopper's The House by the Railroad as Ethel Cain's house in Nebraska - version four

[aryburn-trains]

Nebraska Zephyr Observation Car at Union Station. Chicago, IL 1963

[1900scartoons]

There Are Giants In These Days

October 17, 1908

The Minnesota Gopher looks up at the Giant Nebraska and Ames football players.

The caption reads "The gopher having passed the pumpkin-rollers is now comforted by the cornhuskers."

A week after having beaten the Iowa State football team in Minneapolis, the Golden Gophers were faced the following week by the tough University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, who at that time had beaten their previous three opponents by a combined score of 83-5.

From Hennepin County Library

Original available at: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/Bart/id/6769/rec/2103

[fictionadventurer]

With all this history reading, I have to be very careful not to let it spill over into interactions with ordinary people.

I had a slow moment at work the other day, during which I started thinking about various prominent 19th-century politicians who never became president (as you do). Then I went out by a coworker and I was so close to blurting out (to someone with whom I have never had the slightest personal conversation), "What do you think would have happened if by some miracle Stephen Douglas won the 1860 election?"

Thankfully, I caught myself just in time. But this just proves what a vital role you guys play in giving me an outlet for this stuff in a way that lets me preserve my veneer of sanity.

[20th-century-railroading]

UP train, engine number 2909, engine type 4-6-2 Express train (cherries); 29 cars. Photographed: at Sidney, Nebr., May 31, 1937.

[turtleislandhistory]

August 14, 1720

Otoe and Pawnee warriors attack the Spanish military Villasur expedition in Nebraska, killing 47 people.