By Alan J. Bartels

The brief history of humans in North America pales in comparison to that of sandhill cranes (Grus Canadensis). For many years and as many springs, waves of the large gray birds have sailed north on thermal winds, set their wings and slowly descended into the nurturing flows of the shallow Platte River.

By Katherine Walter

In an age when news is increasingly being sought online, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress have stepped up to the plate to fund and develop a major online resource of historical newspapers. Eventually, the National Digital Newspaper Program will include papers from each state in the U.S., and the state projects are beginning to round the bases. Through the program, the Nebraska Digital Newspaper Project hit its first home run last summer.

Poem by Norma Wilson
Illustration by Paul A. Johnsgard

Sandhill cranes fly up
as the coral sun rises.
At Platte River
a roar of voices
surrounds us.

By Carol McShane, R.N., M.S., CMC

A low rumble of interest is rising in what could become a paradigm shift in health care for late-life elders. Dennis McCullough, M.D., a graduate of Harvard Medical School with 30 years experience as a geriatrician, is advocating for “Slow Medicine.”

By Bruce Garver

Most Americans of Czech and Slovak ancestry are descendants of immigrants who came to the United States from Bohemia, Moravia and northern Hungary between 1865 and 1914. At least half of all such immigrants settled in the states bordering the Great Lakes, while nearly a quarter of all Czech immigrants settled in the Great Plains states to which they were attracted by affordable agricultural land, greater political and religious freedom and lucrative commercial opportunities. Just as the history of these states cannot be comprehended without reference to the rest of the nation, neither can their economy be understood apart from that of the upper Middle West and especially Chicago, as William Cronon has so clearly demonstrated in his imaginative and solidly documented monograph, “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton Co., 1991).

"How Big Will Farms Become?"
April 25, 1974

By Norris Alfred

The definitive story about abandoned farmsteads is yet to be written for this agricultural area. Perhaps it is just as one grows older the past is viewed with increasing nostalgia because the present is so different. As size of farms increase by merging smaller units into larger ones, a way of life is obliterated and the countryside littered with sets of lifeless farm buildings.

By Joel Sartore

It all started in 2005 when my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Though she’s fully recovered now, at the time we knew we were in for a long haul—at least a year of chemo, followed by surgery and radiation. My high-flying days as a National Geographic photographer were over.

By Burns Davis

There are occasions when a voice is heard above the common noise of our lives. Locally there is an artist lifting up her songs for us in the sound of a woman’s voice.

By Bob Reeves

Wildlife and nature photographer Joel Sartore will share his experiences on exotic assignments for National Geographic and other magazines, while holding up a mirror to our relationship with wild creatures and places, in two presentations on March 26 as part of Peacemaking Workshop XXIII.

By Rob Gifford

We walk to the Amway office, past huge posters of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, advertising their new movie “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” The office is a third-floor walk-up. Six other Amway reps are already there. Teacher Hu is there as well, the man who appears to have been responsible for bringing Amway to Zhangye. They all shake my hand and welcome me, and offer me a seat for what turns out to be a meeting to encourage new salesmen to join. Each salesperson has brought along at least one friend, and we sit in the large office on chairs which have been laid out to face a speaker’s table at the front.

By Rex Holsapple

The most recent headlines from the world of public pensions are about “pay to play” and “placement agents.” Before that was Bernie Madoff, market timing, Enron and Orange County. The list goes way back. Public pensions are run by boards of trustees. (Sometimes there is only one member of the board.) What has not really been talked about is the role trustees played in these scandals.

By Dennis Keeney

The term “sustainable” is, in my opinion, the most overused, most misunderstood and most abused word in current environmental and developmental writings.

By John E. Thorson

The Missouri River is synonymous with western history. From its mouth near St. Louis to its headwaters west of Bozeman, Montana, America’s longest river evokes the legends of Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, steamboats, epic floods and monumental dams. Congressional passage of the 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan initiated decades of dam construction, flood control and navigation improvements on the river. The Missouri has also been the venue for waves of litigation and conflict—somewhat ironic given the generally plentiful river. For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s (USACE) revision of the Master Water Control Manual for operating main-stem reservoirs on the river, commenced in 1989, took 15 years to complete in the face of controversy over how the many users of the river would be affected.

By Brad Mellema

Nature centers are a tough business. Last time I checked, Warren Buffet had no nature centers in his holdings, and the business of outdoor education is not on the top of the list for career-minded young people. Despite the obstacles, there is a need, a need for a place for people to connect. What we now call Nebraska Nature & Visitor Center has come about because of a need to connect people of all ages to the Platte River and, in larger part, to Nebraska and the Great Plains.

By Ruth Ann Norton

In today’s economic circumstances, many public health and housing department officials face rising challenges of increasing need and decreasing budgets: how to do more with less. Through an integrated, holistic Green and Healthy Homes intervention strategy, the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI) is producing homes with reduced energy consumption costs that yield better health, social and economic outcomes for occupants and their children.

By Annabel Lee Major

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, with funding from the Nebraska Environmental Trust and the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, will begin training conservation volunteers through the creation of a Nebraska Master Naturalist Program.

By Bruce Kennedy

Most Nebraskans visit the Niobrara River in the summer, for leisurely float trips through a scenic landscape. But decisions that affect whether you can continue to make such float trips, and whether that landscape will remain so scenic, are made at all times of the year. Sometimes, as now, they are made during late winter in the faraway corridors and galleries of the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln.

By Willa Cather

All human history is a record of an emigration, an exodus from barbarism to civilization; from the very outset of this pilgrimage of humanity, superstition and investigation have been contending for mastery. Since investigation first led man forth on that great search for truth which has prompted all his progress, superstition, the stern Pharoah of his former bondage, has followed him, retarding every step of advancement.