Hannibal Hamlin was an American attorney and politician who served as the 15th vice president of the United States from 1861 to 1865, during President Abraham Lincoln's first term. He was the first Republican vice president.
Carl August Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life". When he died in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."
Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
Ripley's Believe It or Not! is an American franchise founded by Robert Ripley, which deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims. Originally a newspaper panel, the Believe It or Not feature proved popular and was later adapted into a wide variety of formats, including radio, television, comic books, a chain of museums and a book series.
Wisconsin Death Trip is a 1973 historical nonfiction book by Michael Lesy, originally published by Pantheon Books. It charts numerous sordid, tragic, and bizarre incidents that took place in and around Jackson County, Wisconsin between 1885 and 1900, primarily in the town of Black River Falls. The events are outlined through actual written historical documents—primarily articles published in the town newspaper—with additional narration by Lesy, as well as excerpts from works by Hamlin Garland, Sinclair Lewis, and Glenway Wescott, which thematically parallel the incidents depicted. The text is accompanied by contemporaneous photographs and portraits taken in Black River Falls by photographer Charles Van Schaick. Thematically, the book emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, pestilence, mental illness, and urbanization.
Theodore J. Kooser is an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2005. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Kooser was one of the first poets laureate selected from the Great Plains, and is known for his conversational style of poetry.
My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, which is considered one of her best works.
Hannibal Hamlin Garland was an American novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Georgist, and psychical researcher. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.
Mari Susette Sandoz was a Nebraska novelist, biographer, lecturer, and teacher. She became one of the West's foremost writers, and wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians.
Sarah Bush Lincoln was the second wife of Thomas Lincoln and stepmother of Abraham Lincoln. She was born in Kentucky to Christopher and Hannah Bush. She married her first husband, Daniel Johnston, in 1806, and they had three children. Daniel Johnston died in 1816, and in 1819, she married widower Thomas Lincoln, joining his family with her three children.
The history of the U.S. state of Nebraska dates back to its formation as a territory by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, passed by the United States Congress on May 30, 1854. The Nebraska Territory was settled extensively under the Homestead Act of 1862 during the 1860s, and in 1867 was admitted to the Union as the 37th U.S. state. The Plains Indians are the descendants of a long line of succeeding cultures of indigenous peoples in Nebraska who occupied the area for thousands of years before European arrival and continue to do so today.
The Hamlin Garland House is a historic house at 356 West Garland Street in West Salem, Wisconsin, USA. It was from 1893 to the 1910s the principal residence of writer Hamlin Garland (1860–1940). Garland was a prominent and well-regarded writer of regional fiction. Designated a National Historic Landmark, it is now a museum managed by the local historical society.
Kate McPhelim Cleary was a 19th-century Canadian-American author.
Ted Genoways is an American journalist and author. He is a contributing writer at Mother Jones and The New Republic, and an editor-at-large at Pacific Standard. His books include This Blessed Earth and The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food.
The Harvey P. Sutton House, also known as the H.P. Sutton House, is a six-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot (370 m2) Frank Lloyd Wright designed Prairie School home at 602 Norris Avenue in McCook, Nebraska. Although the house is known by her husband's name, Eliza Sutton was the driving force behind the commissioning of Wright for the design in 1905–1907 and the construction of the house in 1907–1908.
The following works deal with the cultural, political, economic, military, biographical and geologic history of pre-territorial North Dakota, Dakota Territory and the State of North Dakota.
Crumbling Idols is a collection of 12 essays written and completed by Hamlin Garland in 1894. Garland was one of the most prominent American authors of the early 20th century, and contributed heavily to the literary movement known as American Realism. His work, Crumbling Idols, expresses his views and manifesto as a veritist (realist) artist. In it, he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of a uniquely American literature, one that breaks away from tradition and the past and focuses on the present in order to depict reality through the artists own eyes.
Jason Edwards: an Average Man is an 1892 novel by American author Hamlin Garland. First published by the Arena Publishing Company in Boston, the novel is divided into two parts entitled The Mechanic and The Farmer, respectively. There are two major settings that accompany each section. In the first part, the setting is in Boston and then moves to Boomtown, a prairie town in the Midwest, in the second part. The book takes place over a period of ten years, beginning in 1879 and finishing in 1889, but an important part of the novel takes place in 1884 as well. Most scenes written about in the novel are set in the summer months. Jason Edwards takes place during the Gilded Age in American History.
The Arena was a liberal literary and political magazine published by Arena Publishing Co. in Boston, Massachusetts. It was founded by Benjamin Orange Flower in 1889 and existed for twenty years. Though it had a circulation of more than 30,000 at one point, it was rarely profitable. The final issue was published in August 1909.
